Yes, there is a “call tracking dilemma” for marketers at large, successful businesses. It also applies to digital agencies they partner with to drive customer engagement and revenue.
And yes, DialogTech has solved it with the launch of SourceTrak™ 3.0. (We are extremely excited, as you might expect.)
But before we get to that, let’s cover a bit of background to bring you up to speed.
What Is Call Tracking and Why Is It Important to Big Business
In digital marketing, phone calls matter. This idea, which may have seemed revolutionary as recently as two years ago, is not in dispute today.
Marketers know that, as they shift their digital marketing budget to target consumers on their smartphones, a growing percentage of conversions will come from phone calls. According to eMarketer, 62.6% of digital ad spending in the US this year will target smartphones and mobile devices. These ads will drive over 108 billion phone calls to businesses, according to analyst firm BIA/Kelsey.
These calls come at different times in the customer journey depending on the industry, but they all play an important role in generating business. Studies show that, on average, phone leads become revenue 10 to 15 times more than web leads, often making them the most effective KPI for measuring digital marketing success. It’s why knowing which of your programs generate the most calls and customers has become so critical to optimizing digital marketing performance.
This is where call tracking comes in. Call tracking is a form of marketing attribution technology that enables businesses to know which advertising channels and marketing resources generate inbound phone calls and sales.
Call tracking is especially valuable for Fortune 1000 and other large multi-location companies where phone calls play an important role in the customer journey – such as those in automotive, insurance, financial services, healthcare, hospitality, and for-profit education, to name a few. They drive thousands of calls a week or more from search, display, social, and other digital advertising and need attribution in order to optimize on what’s working and eliminate spend on what isn’t.
So What Is the Call Tracking Dilemma?
The call tracking dilemma is simple: the businesses that drive the most calls and customers from digital marketing (and therefore benefit from call tracking the most) have traditionally been the most reluctant to adopt it.
That’s because legacy call tracking technology just wasn’t built to meet the data, affordability, reliability, and ease-of-implementation requirements that large enterprises and agencies have for tracking calls from digital marketing. So the risks and challenges of implementing call tracking outweighed the benefits, which were limited since data on every call and program wasn’t as detailed or accurate as needed.
SourceTrak 3.0 Solves the Call Tracking Dilemma for Big Business
Which brings us to today’s big announcement. At DialogTech we recognized this dilemma early on, and for the last two years have re-architected and upgraded our industry-leading SourceTrak call attribution technology to enable the world’s largest organizations to realize the full benefits of call tracking without the potential drawbacks. SourceTrak 3.0 is a complete reinvention of how call tracking works for large businesses.
The re-architected and enhanced SourceTrak 3.0 is now the first and only call tracking solution to meet the data, affordability, reliability and ease-of-implementation requirements of today’s biggest businesses investing in digital marketing. It’s available as part of the DialogTech Voice360™ platform, and all SourceTrak 2.0 customers will have automatic access to all SourceTrak 3.0 features — you don’t have to do anything to get started using them.
Complete, Spam-Free Call Attribution Data for Every Call
Whether a call comes from a phone number on your website or directly from a “Call” button in a Google search ad, SourceTrak captures the complete, detailed, and accurate attribution data you need to optimize digital marketing:
- Full Attribution For Every Phone Number on a Website – SourceTrak 3.0 is the only call tracking solution to provide complete call attribution data – including the search keywords, digital ads, referring websites and webpages that drove the call – for every call from every phone number displayed on a website. This includes every number shown in “Find a Dealer” and “Find an Agent” webpages that consumers use to locate and call their closest location or agent.
- Attribution for Return Web Visitors – If a website visitor comes to your website from one digital source (i.e., paid search ad) but does not call, then returns to the site a few days later and places a call, SourceTrak 3.0 attributes the original paid search information and data to that call, regardless of what phone number on the site was called.
- Attribution and Routing for Google Click-to-Call Search Ads – SourceTrak 3.0 provides insight into which keywords generate calls from your Google call extensions and call-only ads, who the caller is, and what happens on each call. You also have complete control over how each call is routed, so you can help get each caller to the best location or agent criteria based on the keyword search or ad that drove the call or the caller’s geographic location.
- Accurate Call Attribution and Revenue Data in Google AdWords – Automatically import SourceTrak 3.0 keyword-level call attribution data and the revenue generated from each caller directly into Google AdWords alongside online data for a complete and accurate analysis of search advertising ROI.
- Sub-Domain and Cross-Domain Attribution – For businesses using multiple website domains and sub-domains, SourceTrak 3.0 follows web visitors as they migrate across these domains without losing referring information, so when a call is made that entire journey is captured and attributed correctly.
- Accurate, Spam-Free Call Data – SourceTrak 3.0 call attribution data is protected by SpamSentry™ technology, which prevents spam calls from distorting marketing data and reaching and frustrating sales agents.
Fast, Seamless Implementation and Integration
Enterprise marketing teams and agencies already analyze and optimize the customer journey for the search keywords, digital ads, and website interactions that generate online engagement. DialogTech’s SourceTrak 3.0 enables them to do the same for offline phone call conversions. The call data appears alongside the online data in the marketing solutions (such as web analytics, bid management, and CRM tools) they already use and requires no change to current processes.
Marketers can implement SourceTrak 3.0 on any website with a few clicks and without any help from IT, any negative impact on website performance or SEO ranking, or any disruption to existing digital ads. Once the code is on a website, it never requires updating:
- Support for Tag Manager Tools: Marketers with no technical experience can implement SourceTrak 3.0 throughout their website in a few clicks using a tag management tool such as Google Tag Manager.
- No Disruption to Current Digital Campaigns: For marketers already using other martech applications from Google, Adobe, or other providers to track and optimize digital advertising, SourceTrak 3.0 is the only call tracking technology that can work with those ads using whatever URL tags you already have. You don’t have to edit your ads with new URL tags and lose any of the ad’s historical data.
- No Negative Impact on Website Performance: Only SourceTrak 3.0 uses an asynchronous JavaScript to find and replace phone numbers on webpages. When webpages load, the script runs separately from other elements and therefore does not cause any delay in load time or page load failures, which can negatively impact digital marketing performance.
- No Negative Impact on SEO: The SourceTrak 3.0 code was built to ensure it never violates Google’s NAP (name, address, phone number) consistency requirements used to determine organic ranking, so there is no negative impact on a website’s search rankings from implementing SourceTrak. Google still sees your business’s phone number in the page code when they index your site, but visitors will see a trackable SourceTrack number. You get all the benefits of call tracking without losing SEO rank.
Affordability
Call tracking relies on pools of phone numbers to attribute calls from digital marketing. The bigger the pool, the more expensive the service. Only SourceTrak 3.0 has heartbeat technology that actively monitors each website session for inactivity and quickly returns phone numbers of inactive sessions to the pool for reuse. This process enables businesses to capture complete attribution with the fewest phone numbers – and lowest cost – of any call tracking provider.
There’s Call Tracking. And Then There’s DialogTech.
To learn more about how the benefits of SourceTrak 3.0 and how DialogTech’s call attribution and conversion platform helps you optimize for calls the same way you do for clicks, please give us a call or send us a message. And please watch our on-demand webinar, How DialogTech Reinvented Call Tracking with SourceTrak 3.0, to learn more about how DialogTech has solved the call tracking dilemma.
