Every call counts.

In many niches, customers still prefer to call rather than fill out a form: renovation, medicine, legal services, delivery, construction. Website form requests are clearly visible in analytics, but calls often have no source attached. As a result, the company pays for ads, search and social media without knowing which channel brings the people who actually call and buy.

Call tracking solves this problem. Let's look at how it works, what options exist, what exactly a business learns from the data and where the method has its limits.

What call tracking is

Call tracking is a technology that identifies where a person who called the company came from. To do this, each channel or each website visitor is shown a separate phone number. When a person dials that number, the system knows which ad or page led them to call.

The call still goes to the company's regular phone or office PBX, and the customer notices nothing. Meanwhile, a record appears in the report: date, duration, source, ad campaign and sometimes the search query. This data can be passed to Yandex Metrica and the CRM, linking the call to the deal that follows.

Why a business needs to know where calls come from

Without the source of a call, it's impossible to compare channels fairly. Ads may bring many visitors but few calls, while a section of the website with modest traffic may generate half of all sales. Until calls are tagged, decisions are made at random.

Reallocating the budget

Knowing the cost per inquiry for each channel, you can pull money from where calls are expensive or empty and add it where customers come in cheaper. This is especially noticeable in pay-per-click advertising: campaigns that look unprofitable based on forms sometimes turn out to be the best by calls. Setting up such campaigns with calls taken into account is part of our work on PPC advertising.

Monitoring how inquiries are handled

Call recordings show how managers respond to customers. Sometimes the ads work, but sales drop because nobody picks up the phone at lunchtime or the wrong price is quoted. Missed calls are visible in the report too, and you can call those people back right away. It's worth making sure in advance that customers are notified that the conversation is being recorded.

Static and dynamic call tracking

These options differ in how precisely they track the source. Static call tracking assigns a number to a channel, while dynamic call tracking assigns it to a specific website visitor.

Static

Each channel gets its own number: one for outdoor advertising, another for flyers, a third for the listing on maps. The setup is simple and inexpensive, and it suits offline advertising and a small number of sources. But it doesn't distinguish anything within a channel: you won't learn which campaign or keyword worked.

Dynamic

With the dynamic option, each website visitor sees their own number from a shared pool. While the person is on the site and for some time after they leave, the number is assigned to them, so the system knows their source, campaign and the pages they viewed.

Number pool

Number substitution on the website only works when there are enough numbers. If more people are on the site at the same time than there are numbers in the pool, the data starts to get mixed up. The pool size is chosen based on traffic, and it has a noticeable effect on the cost of the service.

What the data tells you

Call tracking data answers questions that used to be settled by guesswork. After a month or two of collecting statistics, you can usually see:

• which channels and campaigns bring calls, and which bring only clicks;
• how much one call and one deal cost for each source;
• on which days and at what hours people call most often;
• what percentage of calls is missed and where handling falls short;
• from which pages of the website people are most willing to call.

Together with requests from forms and messengers, this gives a complete picture of inquiries. When calls are linked to deals, you get end-to-end analytics: you see not just the source of a call but the amount of money the channel brought in. We wrote more about how analytics affects decisions in our article on the role of analytics in advertising.

How to implement call tracking

Implementation takes anywhere from a few days to a couple of weeks and goes roughly in this order:

1. Decide which channels to track and where the numbers appear on the website.
2. Choose a service and a call tracking type, and calculate the number pool.
3. Place the code on the website and set up forwarding to the company's phones.
4. Connect the service to Yandex Metrica and the ad accounts.
5. Set up the CRM integration so that a call turns into a deal.
6. Agree on which calls count as qualified, and check the tagging with test calls.

The last step is often skipped. Without it, calls from suppliers, job seekers and random callers end up in the report, and the cost per inquiry looks lower than it really is. If the company doesn't have a CRM yet, that's where to start: why it's needed is covered in our piece on why every business needs a CRM.

Limitations and common mistakes

You won't be able to account for absolutely every call. A person may write down the number from the website and call a week later from a different phone, find the company on maps or come through a referral. Some calls will always remain without an exact source, and that's normal.

A typical mistake is not substituting the number everywhere. If it appears in the header, the footer and on the contacts page but is substituted only in the header, the data gets distorted. Another problem is judging channels only by the number of calls without taking sales into account. A short call asking about vacancies and a long conversation about an order can't be counted the same way.

The opposite happens too: a company implements call tracking, but nobody looks at the reports. The value comes not from the numbers themselves but from regular decisions based on them, once a week or once a month.

Call tracking and working with contractors

Call data helps check the work of everyone involved in promotion. SEO, PPC and SMM get a common evaluation system: not "lots of impressions" but "this many calls and deals." This ends the arguments about who deserves credit for sales.

So when you're choosing whom to hire for SEO or SMM, ask how the contractor will account for calls. If you decide to order SEO aimed at growing inquiries, call tracking will show which pages bring calls after the SEO optimization work. For those who want to order SMM, it will help separate calls from social media from the rest; in SMM this is especially useful because people often call after seeing a post. SMM can also be evaluated in calls.

The same goes for the website. When a company is about to order a website or commission website development, it's better to build the call tracking numbers and their placement into the mockups from the start. A good web studio will discuss this at the specification stage. You can check whether a web development studio provides such services by looking at the web studio's website, reviews and case studies. If you're looking for a contractor through a web studio directory, compare not only portfolios but also the approach to analytics. We described how to brief an agency in our article on the brief for a marketing agency.

Where to start

If your calls aren't tagged yet, start with a simple static setup for your main channels and look at the first numbers. Even this step often changes your view of which advertising works. When the volume of inquiries grows, you can switch to the dynamic option and link calls to deals.

Comprehensive online marketing without call tracking is like bookkeeping with half the invoices missing. At epic name., call tracking is part of our promotion work: we set up inquiry tracking for clients in Moscow and across Russia. Our website, SEO, advertising and SMM work is connected by shared analytics. You can buy SEO separately, or order a website from our web studio together with promotion and call tracking from day one, so less time goes into coordination between different contractors. To discuss your task and order web studio services for a specific goal, see our services.