Call Tracking Analytics: How to Track Offline Calls Using Online Services
Businesses are experiencing a sudden increase in incoming calls from prospective customers. For example, the hotel industry still receives 25% of reservations over the phone. As a marketer, you have to keep things fresh to keep customers coming in. While tracking online traffic is easy, controlling offline traffic can get tricky. A simple solution for this is call tracking. Did you know that by not investing in call tracking, you lower your conversion by 80 %? In this article, we will explain the benefits of offline marketing, the importance of call tracking analytics, tracking different advertising methods, and a guide to using Google Analytics.
Best tools for offline marketing
When it comes to offline marketing, you will want to have the right strategy. While online advertising is everywhere, offline marketing still holds its charm. Let’s take a look at different tools used in offline marketing:
1. Business cards
As one of the most cost-effective offline marketing methods, business cards help to network everywhere you go. Whenever you meet someone new, you can hand over the card and talk a little about your business and how it can help them. It is like a presentation-in-hand to woo potential customers towards your brand.
2. Brochures
A brochure is a brief summary of your company and the products and services you offer. Always keep a few handy and give it out to potential candidates. You can approach local restaurants, hotels, and gift shops, and other physical businesses to hand them out to their customers.
3. Seminars and conferences
A seminar or a conference is another highly effective method that helps you reach out to your potential customer base. At the end of the program, you can show your products and how to use them. By demonstrating experience, you can make the attendees believe that your products or services can solve a potential problem.
1. Find the type of advertisements that work the best
Offline call tracking is just as important as website call tracking. Call tracking analytics help you to discover the type of offline advertisements and marketing strategies that are more beneficial to your business compared to others. You will have to allocate a different phone number to different offline marketing campaigns and channels to generate results.
2. Analyze score quality
There are automated call scoring technologies that use advanced software and human recognition to evaluate the calls on your behalf. You don’t even need to listen to each call. The software gives you a detailed report on what needs to be improved and strong points of the calls.
3. Evaluate the performance of customer care executives
Your business might be doing everything right but lacking in the customer care department. It might be that your department is lacking enough employees or they aren’t trained properly to meet customer expectations. Only a call tracking system will tell you where you are going wrong, so you can improve the performance of your executives.
Billboard advertising has always played a major role in bringing in leads. People come across your billboard advertisement when they are traveling. Apart from being an attractive ad, you need to mention your phone number clearly, so the viewers can call you back.
Call tracking through billboard advertisements
Purchase a number for every area you erect a billboard advertisement, so you can track the number of calls you get from a particular area. Give each advertisement a tracking ID to boost the accuracy of your call tracking system.
Transit and print media are two more efficient ways to bring in more traffic. By advertising your business in magazines, newspaper, or flyers, you reach a large audience. It goes the same with transit media, which helps your advertising reach places where social media might not be able to.
Following the same route with print and transit media
Whenever you commit to transit media advertising, you have to go all out and post it in taxis, buses, trains, and metros. Allocate a tracking phone number of each campaign to gain a clearer view on when you receive the most calls and from which areas of the city.
The very first step for successful call tracking is finding the right software, and Google Analytics happens to be one of them. Along with call tracking on Google Analytics, there are many other software options that you can use, including Google Maps and Google Tag Manager. Let’s take a look at how each of them works:
1. Google Analytics
Most companies create events to track offline calls using events on Google Analytics. It turns offline calls into virtual pageviews, making it easy to calculate and structure data. Even though it is a basic method of collecting data, it is the most efficient.
You create four events on Google Analytics, which we will talk about in the chart below:
You can also set up phone calls as ‘goals’ on Google Analytics. It creates a customized report that will help you determine the phone conversion rate for offline calls.
If the person decides to visit your website, you need a code that connects it with your Google Analytics account. If you are worried about how to link the two, I have a simple code for you that you can copy & paste in your website code. Check the image below for the code:
Here are some benefits of using Google Tag Manager
1. It doesn’t cost anything, so you aren’t incurring an extra cost and you’re getting something very useful for your business.
2. It offers pre-built tag templates for you to work with, which helps you save time. There are templates for connecting your website with Google Analytics, Adwords, and Google Optimize.
3. It allows you to preview, edit, add, and delete tags on all your websites and apps in just a few clicks.
4. It is a well-documented software with a skilled and experienced community to help you out.
Using Google Maps to your benefit
In the same way, you can reserve Google rankings for prospective clients that will Google you before calling you after they see your offline advertisement. Register your company on Google Maps with complete information about your opening hours, website, phone number, and a small description about your business.
When you mention your phone number, Google Maps automatically adds it to the call to action button, so users can call you using the feature without having to open your website.
If you aren’t tracking your success, how will you know if call tracking is working out for you or not? Here are three methods to track the success of offline calls:
1. Monitor the total volume of calls you receive daily
By tracking call records, you can estimate the reach of your offline advertisements. You can automate the tracking by using Google Analytics, so you don’t have to do it manually. Call analytics will help you develop a better understanding of your business’s return of interest.
Another crucial thing that you can find out through tracking phone calls is the pattern of calls. You can check out which days you receive the highest number of calls, which time during the day there’s high traffic, and which strategies are working and which aren’t.
2. Keep track of every type of call and caller
Offline calls can be difficult to track because you can’t always be sure from where the person is calling you. You can allocate a different tracking phone number to every campaign you run and track the call. You might find that transit media ads don’t work for you, whereas newspaper and magazine ads are a success.
3. Total call duration
The average call duration of the calls you get and make tells a lot about your business. While a long call might convey that you are turning most leads into customers, it also indicates that customers are asking unnecessary information. It only reduces the efficiency and productivity of your customer care department. This means you need to go back and make changes in your advertisements and website, so customers have all the information they need before making a call.
Start call tracking your offline ads to get a complete picture of your company’s growth.