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The Drawback of Vanity Numbers in the Digital World

Jonathon Byrd Customer Success Director, DialogTech

Vanity numbers are a great marketing tool that allows customers to easily remember how to contact your business. If I want to easily order flowers, I can call 1-800-FLOWERS. If I’m on my last pair of contacts, I can easily pick up the phone and dial 1-800-CONTACTS. However, many purchases may not always be this quick and simple. Companies like those listed above still run digital campaigns to drive visitors to their website, and those visitors will not always complete their purchase online. Whether the visitor uses a mobile device or a desktop, there is always a chance they may pick up the phone to call. If a business relies solely on a vanity number, they can face the following problems:

Lack of Attribution of Phone Calls to Digital Advertising Efforts

When you use a vanity number on your website it prevents your marketing team from taking advantage of a key piece of marketing technology called call attribution. Call attribution is the ability to use dynamic phone number insertion, which automatically replaces the hard coded phone number on your website and tracks online calls back to the digital sources that originally drove the visitor to your site. This includes the search engine they used, the keyword being bid on, or any other referral domain. Without this valuable data, your marketing department is restrained from being fully able to optimize their digital advertising campaigns.

Inability to Properly Test Landing Page Variations

If your website only uses vanity numbers, not only will your marketing team be unable to attribute calls to online advertising sources, but it will also be difficult for them to determine which variations of your landing pages convert the most visitors. Sure, they will be able to determine which visitors downloaded an app, filled out a form, or purchased online. But without including those conversions that happened offline (phone calls), they will not be able to fully determine if landing page version B drove 50% more total conversions over variation A.

Limits in Improving the Overall Caller Experience

Website visitors have come to expect a customized experience related to what they’re looking for. It’s why marketers create landing pages unique to a visitor’s searches and remarketing ads related to past interests. This optimized web experience should continue over the phone – however, using a vanity number limits this. Utilizing the combination of dynamic number insertion and landing page optimization, you can create a better overall experience for your callers. For example:

  • Dynamically route callers to a location or branch nearest to them
  • Route callers based on the marketing campaign or keyword they searched
  • Direct current customers or repeat callers to a different end destination to not send irrelevant calls to sales teams
  • Address calls differently based on the targeted audience or persona you used to drive the visitor to your site

Unable to Completely Optimize Website Content and Design

Using a vanity number can also prevent marketing teams from fully optimizing the website. The combination of dynamic number insertion and web analytics tools, such as Google Analytics and Convertro, can provide insight into which online activities lead to a phone call. This helps marketers determine which sequence of pages and/or events eventually drive calls and, therefore, how they can shorten that path to drive those conversion more efficiently. Furthermore, the combination of these two pieces of marketing technology allows marketers to see which actions are driving phone calls when they shouldn’t. For example, why are 20% of visitors calling from the second page of the check-out process? Perhaps there is an issue with the page that should be investigated.

It is important to note that vanity numbers can still be used and displayed to direct visitors to a website. If a marketing team does not wish to track these visitors’ web activities, this number can still be displayed for branding purposes. To learn more about the benefits of call tracking technology, read our research report on the 49% mobile ROI mistake marketers are making or contact us for a demo.