Anatomy of calltracking: how to analyze calls to the company

Probably, not all of the readers were faced with call tracking, but many have heard of it. There are not so many details in Runet, what call tracking is and what it is eaten with. Nevertheless, this is a very useful tool for evaluating the effectiveness of advertising channels and individual campaigns. For example, you can evaluate the effectiveness of online conversion using Google Analytics and Yandex.Metrics, but what about the phone calls? How to understand exactly which ad a customer called, which particular advertising campaign brought more calls? Call Tracking allows you to keep track of it all.

We decided to make a series of articles about this tool. And let's start with the basics.

What is calltracking for?

The ultimate goal of any business is to make a profit. Ideally, you want it to grow, and for this you need to increase sales and reduce costs. One of the ways is to attract new customers, which means that advertising is needed. But if its efficiency is not analyzed, then the advertising budget can be wasted.
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It may seem to you that in our age of online commerce, social networks, instant messengers and chat bots, the problem of analyzing phone calls is contrived. But it is not. According to various sources, about 70% of all calls to the company are phone calls. For example, it is unlikely that most people buy cars or real estate only after visiting sites.

Call-tracking is based on a very simple idea: using different phone numbers for different advertising campaigns, sites, channels, visitors. And depending on what number the person called, you can immediately understand where he learned about you and what advertisement he came from.

Advertising is not a cheap pleasure, therefore it is vital to evaluate the effectiveness of advertising in all its manifestations - outdoor, banner, contextual, in the media ... For example, the cost of one transition through contextual advertising to popular queries, such as an apartment in Moscow, can reach several thousand rubles. And if you can find the requests that lead the most people with the help of call tracking, you can save a lot of your advertising budget. In addition, different channels can be used within the same advertising campaign, including SMM. But what if a channel simply does not work, and we pay money for using it? For example, invested in banners on partner sites, but there are no calls on them. Or maybe people come to the site for some advertising, read, but do not call?

With call tracking, you can identify the inefficiency of some channels and even individual banners / videos / layouts / keywords.

Call Tracking Types

Calltracking can be of three types: static, dynamic and combined.

Static call tracking is the attachment of one phone number to one advertising channel. For example, on billboards one number, in advertising on Yandex - another, on Google - the third, and so on. You can make a more subtle division: one number for contextual advertising, and the second - for free search results. And then we will see that with free search results, X people called, and with contextual search, Y.

Unfortunately, static call tracking has its drawbacks: you cannot evaluate conversion in terms of advertising campaigns, keywords, advertising banners and landings, you cannot use advertising automation tools, you cannot segment your audience, and there are a number of limitations. In other words, static call tracking is just a simple collection of statistics without in-depth analytics. But this may be enough for small companies with a small amount of advertising.

Dynamic call tracking is a selection for each site visitor of a separate phone number. Suppose a person goes to us on some kind of announcement. The link transmits various UTM tags, including the source of the transition, the advertising channel, the name of the advertising campaign, and the keyword. Based on this unique link, a visitor ID is generated — a counter value in the form of a cookie — and a unique phone number is displayed in the site header for that ID. The call tracking system records the “visitor – number” bundle and all UTM tags, and then sends them in the right format anywhere: to the database, to CRM, to call center software, to advertising automation systems or to pass-through analytics. And while a person walks through the site and does something, his counter sends to the server messages about events - the so-called “hits”. While the user is active, a unique phone number is stored after him. When a person leaves the site, the session closes, but the number is assigned for a while from 5 to 30 minutes. This is the so-called freeze time. If the user decides to call the number that showed the call tracking, then we will correctly determine the call. According to our statistics, more than 90% of visitors call within half an hour after entering the site.

Of course, all this can not be applied to offline advertising. Therefore, companies that are advertised not only on the network usually use a combination of static and dynamic call tracking - unique telephone numbers are allocated to each site visitor and offline channels, one number for the entire channel. The collected data is aggregated and displayed in a common interface. We call it a combined call tracking .

Our call tracking service

Our service is able to collect detailed data separately on campaigns, on channels, on landing pages and other cuts. It integrates not only into various statistics collection and analysis tools, but also into your usual tools - CRM, BI, telephony, end-to-end analytics tools: Google Analytics, Yandex.Metrica, ROISTAT, ORIGAMI, K50, OWOX BI, AMO CRM, BITRIX 24 , Google AdWords, Yandex.Direct and others.

For example, you can integrate our service with Google Analytics and receive reports on online and offline conversions in your familiar environment, making changes right away and thereby controlling the effectiveness of advertising. For example, if the Origami system is connected to you, then after integrating call tracking with Yandex.Metrica, you can set up data transfer to Yandex.Direct and automatically manage contextual advertising rates.

But not always people call the number that they saw on the company's website. For example, phone numbers are often displayed directly in search results, and if a person has logged in from a smartphone or tablet, he can immediately call without following the link to the site. The call tracking service allows you to calculate how many people saw an advertisement in a search engine, but did not click on it, but immediately called.

You can go even further and select individual phone numbers, for example, for the VK page, for printing on handouts, for use in advertising on the radio, in the press, on billboards (you can even specify different phones on different streets). That is, call tracking allows you to select calls not only from the site, but from any promotion channels.

What is the strength in, brother?

Our call tracking has several advantages. One of them is an unlimited pool of clean (unused) numbers for dynamic and combined call tracking. This greatly increases the accuracy of the analysis, and this will be discussed in the next publication. And now I would like to touch on the eternal topic - the cost of the service.

For companies offering call tracking, the rates depend on the size of the package of telephone numbers you choose in advance . But site traffic can vary widely. It depends on the availability of stocks, seasonality and geography of services, time of day. Let's say you bought a combined call tracking package for 10 numbers, and after a while you started a seasonal sale and some kind of promotion. Or hired a new marketer who made better advertising and brought traffic. Or maybe they signed a contract with a new advertising agency, which actively got down to business. And in order to correctly register and analyze all incoming calls, you need to increase the package of numbers. And this is usually done by a written statement . And when the traffic is reduced, you have to write the application again and refuse the "extra" numbers in order not to waste money. It turns out not too fast and very uncomfortable. Moreover, statistics on customers who came at an unexpected peak is most important. What exactly worked, what caused this attendance — all this will be lost. That is why it is so important to track them on time.

We have a different approach - no packages, you only pay for phone number displays. That is, a unique visitor came to the site, we gave him a unique number, wrote off X kopecks. Logged in 1000 people, you paid for 1000 hits. The system is transparent and flexible, no correspondence delays and approvals. All numbers are allocated automatically and free of charge - we do not charge "installation payments" for connecting numbers. So you only pay for the actual number of used numbers , and not for an approximate package, which may be excessive or insufficient. So you will plan expenses much more accurately: by launching an advertising campaign, you can predict an increase in traffic and immediately calculate how much the cost of call tracking will increase, thereby saving a lot.

But we must understand that such conditions work only for our clients - the rest, in order to get started, you need to connect our virtual PBX.

More on the cost of the show affects the duration of freeze time. Recall: after a visitor leaves the site, a unique number is held for him for some time, and if a person calls, the system will correctly account for this call in the general statistics. The longer the freeze time, the more expensive one showing the phone number. But the optimal duration depends on the specific industry and site complexity. It is enough for one companies and 5 minutes, because their visitors quickly make purchase / call decisions. For sites with a large number of pages or with complex products and services freeze time should be increased. For example, for medical sites 15 minutes is not enough - you need at least 30 minutes. Optimization of freeze time makes our solution twice cheaper than some competitive ones.

In our experience, some customers already have their numbers and want to use them. This happens, for example, if the sales cycle is very long. These clients can use a pool of dynamic numbers, consisting of their own. But such numbers should be enough. In this case, customers will be sure that they will be reached in a day and in a year. This generally removes the question of freeze time.

An important feature of our call tracking is protection against fraudulent traffic. Clients can set the upper limit of the call tracking budget, thereby protecting themselves from unfair cheating from competitors.

Finally

We considered what call tracking is, what it is for and what it is. We also touched on one of the advantages of our service - the pricing system. Next time we will look at setting up and using call tracking in detail, and also explain why it is so important to have a lot of free phone numbers for accurate analysis of incoming calls. By the way, this particular advantage was recently noted at the ComNews Awards, where our company received an award for call tracking.

We will be glad to answer your questions!