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Call tracking is extremely important to know the precise efficiency of your online marketing efforts. Especially if you receive most of your leads or sales through the phone.

Most businesses are hesitant about using call tracking due to several misconceptions like it is not worth the expense, among others.

In this Shark Bite Andrew explains how call tracking works and why you should let go of some of those misconceptions that surround it and start using it to your advantage.

Thanks for watching, I hope you enjoyed it. See you at the next Shark Bite!

Video Transcription

Hey everybody. My name is Andrew Lolk and today we’ll be talking about call tracking and the typical misconceptions that small business owners have about call tracking.

Call tracking basically allows you to see exactly how your marketing efforts are performing by measuring how many calls you’re getting and exactly where they’re coming from.

Getting Started

To get started with call tracking you need to add a piece of code to your website. That code will replace your existing business number with a generated forwarding number.

I know that changing your phone number might seem like a big deal, you might be concerned and you might have wanted to brand your phone number.

However today in 2015, it’s not really a big deal to brand your phone number, and there are a couple of reasons for this.

Reason number one is that your phone number itself won’t really change. The only times that your phone number will change is, let’s say somebody comes from AdWords, then they’ll see a different number, and when they call that number, it will trigger a response in your software that will show you that call is coming from AdWords, so your phone number doesn’t really change.

And the second reason is that phone number branding unless you’re a huge brand, doesn’t really matter today. Back in the day, you had to either remember the phone number or swipe through 50 pages in the phone book. That’s not how we do today. Today we just snap a picture of the phone number, or we just tap it into the phone. We don’t have to remember them anymore.

It Is Worth the Cost

There are many different call tracking providers out there, for instance, dialogtech, or Convirza, and I’m sure you’re thinking, “Andrew, what’s the cost of this whole call tracking thing?” Well yes, there’s a cost but I can also tell you from an AdWords standpoint if you’re spending a couple thousand on AdWords, then I can personally get much more out of a lesser budget versus having the entire budget, and no call tracking.

So I’d rather take less budget and call tracking, and actually know what’s going on. The reason is that with call tracking, you’re able to optimize for what really matters for your business, which is at the end of the day, leads.

Valuable Tips

Before I leave you I want to give you three main tips for working with call tracking.

Tip number one is only to count real phone calls. When I say a real phone call, I mean you could put in a minimum duration that your call should last. I typically use 60 seconds but you can use it however it fits your business.

Number two is to always record your calls and the reason why I’m saying this is that when you record it, you can get more information about your business, and you know exactly how either yourself or your sales reps are at managing new customers coming to your business.

And number three, and this is very important from an AdWords standpoint, is that you can import every single call into Analytics or AdWords so that you can optimize much faster by having the conversion data right in the interface.

Want to know more about call tracking? Well check out our blog posts on whitesharkmedia.com,  otherwise, I’ll see you next time.