Kim Irvine, general manager of Zintel walks us through ‘Call Tracking’, which can calculate the amount of phone enquiries generated by different marketing campaigns.

Imagine you’re running a campaign that includes banner ads across multiple sites, billboards, magazine ads and a TVC. How do you accurately track if these ads are making the phone ring with new sales leads or customers?

Online is traditionally easier than offline to track but both can present challenges. So as a marketer how can you be sure you are getting the full picture of the success of your campaigns?

Through call tracking. It captures the details of customers’ calls including the source, campaign, location and keyword.

This goldmine of information then allows you to see what ad is working and what isn’t and then streamline your campaign, saving on costs and generating more sales – keeping the boss happy.

Dynamic Numbering

By using a series of unique phone numbers, marketers can track the source of a phone call generated from both online and offline marketing activity

Depending on how in depth a business wants to go, each source, such as a banner ad, keyword or Pay-Per-Click ad, is allocated a unique phone number and this is the number that will display when a visitor arrives at your site. This allows you to identify what the customer has clicked on to find your phone number.

This method can also be used for traditional marketing such as print ads, billboards or TV commercials.

Through identifying which numbers are being called the most you can easily see which marketing campaign is more successful and transfer the budget from any underperforming ads to successful ones, saving on your budget and generating more sales at the same time.

Dynamic numbering can be tailored to companies’ needs, some may choose to use only three or four numbers and others can choose to use hundreds.

To localise your business you can also choose to use virtual local numbers. So if someone clicks on your ad in Brisbane they will be shown a Queensland number, if they click on your number in Melbourne they will be shown a Victorian number.

All of these calls will be routed to where they need to go, such as your office in Sydney. This gives the feel to customers that they are dealing with a local person who may have more insight into what they want than someone from a different state. 

Completing the picture

Call tracking helps you to put in the last piece of the tracking puzzle to measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaign both online and offline. Using this information you will be able to tailor your methods to match what your customers are looking for.

You will also be able to track the ROI of your campaigns to maximise your marketing impact and make sure those dollars are working hard.

What do you think of call tracking? Has any one used it and had any success or miserable failure. Please share your story with us, drop a comment below…