At first, call-center tracking for digital advertising campaigns may seem a little confusing. But when broken down, the subject becomes a little easier to understand.
We know that call centers are a way to provide great customer service to clients through optimizing both outbound or inbound calls. We also know that digital ads are promotional advertisements that are seen on social media, search engines, or websites.
But what is call-center tracking and how is it related to digital ad campaigns? This Q&A will help answer your burning questions and aid you in understanding why it’s important for the growth of your business.
Q: Before we dig in, let’s start with an explanation of what RingCentral does.
John Allen, Director of Global SEO at RingCentral: RingCentral provides cloud-based communication solutions. The firm is one of the leading VoIP companies in its field as it elevates the use of technology to give customers varied communication options.
Using just one platform, people can talk to each other through team messaging, voice calls, and video calls. This can be done through a contact center or an individual. RingCentral makes it easy to bring international teams together by enabling the allocation of several numbers. You can even give unique numbers to each website visitor.
This VoIP provider also makes sure that everything is secure and flexible, making it easier for companies to connect with businesses and customers both locally and around the world.
Q: Can you explain call tracking and how it’s used within digital ad campaigns?
JA: Call tracking is pretty much what it says on the tin. It records calls and uses software to take data from incoming and outgoing calls. Occasionally, conversations are recorded too. Marketers often use it to discover how successful campaigns are and which methods work. This means companies can continue their best practices, knowing which digital ads are working, and which aren’t.
Call tracking takes the guesswork out of knowing how much digital ad campaigns are affecting phone-driven sales. This is because VoIP allows different numbers to be allocated to each advert. So, when people call in, call center staff will know which advert it came from.
Source: Wordstream
Q: Doesn’t showing a unique phone number to every website visitor or based on the channel require an enormous amount of phone numbers?
JA: No, because “dynamic” phone numbers are reused. Once a visitor to your website is assigned a number, it remains allocated to them for a certain amount of time. If they do not call, it gets reassigned to somebody else.
Consider it in terms of your sales territory planning and typical customer behavior. For example, if you know customers usually call within a couple of minutes of visiting your website, you can use this information to make the number available again. If it hasn’t been dialed in the last few days, you can reassign it to a new visitor and target them instead.
Q: In order to successfully leverage call tracking within digital campaigns, what tools do you need and how is it implemented?
JA: Starting with the basics, a recording tool will help track calls, while digital marketing tools will help you share advertisements to your target audience.
Using tools like Google Analytics allows you to optimize and organize your virtual project management by figuring out which keywords will fit best with each advertisement. When using this tool, you can also “tag” any number featured on your site. As a link is created, when a customer taps the number, a call is automatically made. It is then added to the report–giving you details on where they called from, and what (if any) keywords were searched for. The same goes for tools like Google Ads.
Q: What kind of data do call-tracking platforms capture from phone calls that can be helpful for marketers?
JA: Call-tracking platforms can capture data from the caller’s digital actions once the call begins. What’s captured depends on how sophisticated the software used across your work from home call centers is.
It’s possible to capture keywords, ad groups, and partner IDs. They can also capture conversational data, such as the call outcome and any purchases made. As well as this, contextual data (calling page), and call data (such as duration and start time) can be captured too.
Q: How can a call-tracking platform tie phone calls back to marketing efforts that drove them?
JA: Unique trackable phone numbers and data collection are used to tie marketers to the customer’s journey. Special software is used to create a digital tag to each customer who visits your site or makes a call.
So, whether a customer clicks through online game ads or a digital clothes ad, you can track where the marketing effort came from.
Source: Vici Media
Q: From your point of view, what are the benefits of call tracking?
JA: Call tracking has some great benefits. Firstly, it keeps you a step ahead of competitors in terms of mobile engagement. A rise in leads using mobiles can be capitalized on much easier.
Customer journeys can also be analyzed, thus optimizing your sales funnel. It keeps you connected with customers, showing that remote work doesn’t mean a drop in sales. When call center software utilizes call tracking, you can also boost your outreach through omnichannel marketing as you can see what channels your customers respond best on.
Q: What are some common roadblock that marketers face when implementing call tracking within their digital ad campaigns?
JA: One common roadblock is dealing with conversations that happen with customers offline, as they can’t be recorded and measured.
An example of this might be if you post an ad on social media about the benefits of warehouse management system. You may be having lunch with a client when it comes up in conversation, and they decide they want to invest in this. You wouldn’t have a digital record as to where the interest in the advertisement came from or the conversation that was had about it.
Q: Can you provide a use case of a call center successfully leveraging call tracking in a programmatic display campaign to provide better attribution for their leads?
JA: Yes. The use case below shows how calls coming in from different channels can help your business gain insights that’ll help with targeting leads more effectively.
Source: Dialogtech
Q: Any final thoughts?
JA: Call tracking is an excellent way of providing and monitoring specific business needs. It helps optimize digital ad campaigns–whether you’re providing an ad for a video called “Startup funding stages explained” or a visual for the latest homeware.
There is a whole inventory of phone numbers to choose from with call tracking, allowing you to allocate specific numbers to specific adverts and discover which work the best. It’s the ideal way to follow a customer journey from start to finish as well as being able to deliver accurate and detailed reports.
It also allows staff in phone centers to take calls from customers knowing which ad the calls came from. This enables them to provide a more personal customer experience–which in turn helps your business to grow.
John Allen, Director, Global SEO at RingCentral, a global UCaaS, VoIP and auto dialler software provider. He has over 14 years of experience and an extensive background in building and optimizing digital marketing programs. He has written for websites such as Silver-peak and SendinBlue.
