What is Call Tracking Software and how does it work?

Every business receives inbound phone calls. Businesses that advertise and rely on high volume inbound calls must know where these calls are coming from and why the caller is attempting to contact the business. This information is essential for the company to maximize revenue generation. How does a business identify the source and optimize the opportunity in these calls? The answer is call tracking software.

This article will define what call tracking software is, how it benefits companies and how to make the most out of this software.

What is Call Tracking Software?

Call tracking software is a technology that records information about phone calls. The data provides business managers insight on the telephone call performance of marketing activities such as paid search, website performance, third party (affiliate) advertising, and more. The data provided to the business allows managers to parse and analyze the information. This information may be used to track the performance of the employees or the advertising campaigns. Performance may be measured in various methods such as call duration, sales, conversions or any other milestone.

Call Center Agent

What are the different types of Call Tracking?

There are three common types of telephone tracking.

Call Back (Click to Call) – There are two common types of call back tracking methods. Both methods require third party website tracking software such as Google or Adobe Analytics to track the website visitor source origination.

Request a Call – website visitors click on a link and completes a form to request a call from a company representative. The website visitor is only required to download standard web plugins. There is no need for the website visitor to download or install any additional software on their device. The call tracking takes place externally from the website.

Click to Dial – visitors browse the company website using a mobile device. The visitors click on a link and the link triggers a call from the device to the company.

Static Number Tracking – Businesses purchase or rent several unique telephone numbers. The company may individually assign each number to an advertising campaign such as print, digital media, television or any other promotion. When the advertising campaign is launched, the business manager is able to examine the call volume, duration and any other key performance indicator to determine if the adverting campaign was successful. Businesses typically setup dedicated landing pages and drive traffic the specific page for web-based tracking. Each channel would receive a dedicated landing page with a dedicated telephone number.

Dynamic Call Tracking – is web based and allows websites to dynamically swap the telephone numbers displayed on their website. Dynamic call tracking service providers deliver businesses with code to be installed on the website. The code controls the telephone number that is displayed on the website. A difference between static number tracking and dynamic call tracking is the destination page. Traffic may be funneled to the same page and the telephone number changes depending upon the source of the traffic with dynamic call tracking. There are two types of dynamic call tracking.

Channel based call tracking – allows companies to track calls based on the digital source. The data collected from the call is on a high level and provides the business with the aggregate performance. The data may be broken down on a lower level, however; the company will need to acquire additional telephone numbers if the data needs to be broken from channel down to each campaign or ad group.

Session-based call tracking – allows businesses to track calls with additional data on the exact session based on the call in addition to the digital source. The additional data may be device type, location, keyword source, landing page, conversion page, campaign and more. The call tracking software assigns a temporary telephone number to each user session. There are multiple telephone numbers in the system and the numbers are assigned to any channel. The call tracking software manages the information and provides the data to the company. Session-based call tracking provides more detailed information and allows marketers additional insight to make better decisions.

What are the benefits of Call Tracking Software?

The benefits of call tracking software are the valuable insights the software provides to business managers to analyze and make data driven decisions. These valuable insights are derived from the call metrics and data. The company may analyze the call tracking data to provide attribution to the proper marketing campaigns, optimize and scale improved results. Some of the best information call tracking software can provide is:

Marketing source call tracking – provides businesses with information about which advertising source originated each call. The data can be aggregated and companies can determine what advertising source is driving the highest volume of calls, how many leads are created and how many conversions the source created.

Marketing source metrics – the benefit of session-based call tracking is the level of information detail provided to businesses. Data such as marketing source, marketing campaign, marketing medium, keyword, landing page, device type, conversion page and more may be collected.

Call performance tracking – provides companies with performance data of each individual call. The performance data may be call duration, how often an employee interacts with the lead after the lead was generated, agent progress to ensure they are on call volume target for the day, etc.

Business managers may analyze the information and make decisions to invest more revenue into sources that are generating the most sales, focus more resources on the leads that were created by the best sources, scale and maximize campaigns.

How does Closecall relate to Call Tracking Software?

Closecall is more than a call recording software program. It is a powerful incident recreation, liability control and workforce optimization tool. Closecall contains call tracking features in addition to call recording. These features are available to support business managers and provide them with the call tracking information they need to make informed decisions. Some of the call tracking features that make Closecall effective are:

Quality Control Reports – The quality control reports provide test results based upon quality control tests that were setup for sales training and coaching. Business managers can monitor calls, generate reports showing negative or positive progression and have data to help employees understand their progress.

In-Depth Business Intelligence Reports – These reports allow business managers to track the busiest time of day, week or year. This enables managers to ramp up their workforce at the proper times to facilitate high call volumes, assign shifts, breaks and more.

Speech analytics – This feature allows managers to analyze thousands of minutes of audio by searching for specific phrases and saves time. This feature includes:

• Speech-to-text conversion
• Search-by-word or phrase from audio recording
• Flag, bookmark, or e-mail calls containing specific criteria

and more …

There are multiple Call Tracking features that are not listed in this article. To find out if Closecall has the Call Tracking feature you need contact us.