Best Ways To Track Calls From SEO, PPC, And Social Media

Intro

So, you have a well-thought-out marketing campaign, but do you imagine how much better it can be if you** track calls? **With the right call tracking software, you can analyze a customer journey, minimize fraud, improve your ads, and get more leads.

For example, if your business relies heavily on social media promotion, Facebook call tracking might provide valuable insights into callers. You'll know which campaigns drive customers and revenue, and which don't work and may be a waste of time and money.

The same is true for Google Ads: call tracking will show how well your Google call-only ads perform. And, of course, the right call management software suite can also help you figure out how to enhance customer service, and your conversions will skyrocket eventually.

Let's see the best ways to track calls and get consumers who convert into sales.

Why Is It Important to Track Calls?

Call tracking, enabled by dozens of call management solutions you can find on the market, helps you uncover what drives inbound calls and, hopefully, sales: channels, ads, and SEO efforts, among other things.

While Social Media and Google Ads clicks are easily tracked, a trigger for a phone conversation may remain unknown for a business. Certainly, you can ask a caller how they found out about your service, but you can also use special tools for this task.

But why should you track phone calls, and how can it be beneficial for your company?

Here are the main reasons to analyze inbound calls:

• You can fully explore the customer journey in your sales funnel
• You can understand which sources and online solutions work best
• You can uncover insights into customer experiences during calls to improve greetings, reduce wait times, etc.
• You can manage your budget more efficiently because you'll know which channels are worth investing in based on call analytics

Ultimately, knowing call tracking data – who your callers are, where they are coming from, what they want, and how you can convert them into sales – can help you grow your bottom line exponentially in the long run. Likewise, you will know when your business receives most of the calls, making sure more sales reps are available at that time.

Without any doubt, call tracking is crucial for any call-reliant business, with the right inbound call tracking software standing at the forefront of it all.

Best Ways to Track Calls Revealed: Social Media, SEO, and PPC

Now, it's time to get to the point and see which practices can help you explore conversion tracking metrics. Those include specialized software, Google Ads call reports, dynamic number insertion, and other options.

Below, we'll take a closer look at how to track calls from a range of sources, like SEO, PPC, and social media.

Software To Track Calls

Call tracking software can serve various purposes and provide insights into your advertising channels, showing which campaigns were most successful. When you clearly understand how tracking software works and master it, you may want to use it to:

• Collect information about a caller, like their location and conversation patterns
• Analyze inbound calls and compare campaigns
• Integrate it with your CRM system
• Detect phone calls from Google Ads and social media platforms
• Record conversations to receive more insights
• Predict the future of a campaign using call tracking software results

Certainly, there are many more ways to improve your ROI with call tracking, depending on the nature of your call generation or acquisition, your audience, and other factors.

Dynamic Number Insertion (DNI)

Dynamic number insertion is the replacement of your company phone numbers with unique numbers for campaigns on different channels. DNI makes first-touch attribution and metrics research much easier, as a marketer can track calls and see exactly which source drove the conversion. You'll know which Facebook or Google ads, keywords, or channels are more effective.

Let's say you advertise on several platforms, and your product or service was exactly what a Facebook user needed. They dial this unique number, and it's where social media traffic tracking does the trick. You'll see that the conversion came not from Google or your website, but from Facebook. By the way, marketers say Facebook delivers the highest ROI of 54% among social media platforms.

By the way, DNI works not only for call tracking for Facebook ads – the entire phone conversation of a caller is traceable. Moreover, no one will see the same number, which allows for accurate research of each conversion. So, you'll access data from tracking phone calls from Google Ads and PPC, too.

Google Ads Call Reporting

A Google Analytics call tracking option will help you find out how many people interacted with your PPC placements. Once you start using this tool, you'll get a forwarding phone number for your advertisement or website. It's a nice way to track calls from PPC, as when a person dials, you'll obtain the following insights in your Google Ads account:

• Duration of a call
• Time when the call started
• Their phone number (for 15-sec conversations)
• Marketing campaign

Note that you can't use the provided phone number outside Google Ads. Anyhow, it will lead a client who dialed it to your business for 60 days. You need to enable call reporting in Google Ads to analyze paid traffic calls.

A Google Ads account is quite a strong player in precise offline conversion tracking, helping you measure your ROI. Just adjust the settings in your account, and voila, some valuable traffic data is coming in. Here's what you have among the available options:

• Call-only ads tracking. Once you place an advertisement with a clickable phone number, a prospect only needs to actually click to make contact. Everything, from the duration to the conversation record, will be at your disposal.
• Website call attribution. To get accurate information about conversations that brought you sales, you may set a specific length. Short ones (like 15-30 seconds) are unlikely to end in a purchase.
• Call extensions tracking. You can place a phone number button independently under your ad and also analyze this traffic source using Google Ads.

This is how you can use phone call conversion metrics to analyze how well your PPC performs.

Google Tag Manager

If you want to track phone calls from your website, Google Tag Manager is at your service. For this, you also need Google Analytics. To get the required data, you'll have to create a tag in GTM and set the event name (for example, "website phone call"). Adding other configurations will make everything work. Set up a trigger and track calls to** **better understand your traffic. Basically, it's like coding, but without the participation of an IT specialist.

At this point, you might also need a Google forwarded number.

A phone snippet code will look like this:

Source: Google Ads Help

CRM Systems

You can use your CRM for marketing attribution and stay aware of the outcomes of calls and campaigns on different platforms. The functionality of those systems is vast, and some offer businesses technology that enables offline conversion analysis. Not only marketers, but also sales and support managers can benefit from CRM metrics. They can use data to improve interactions and better learn customer needs.

When it comes to marketing, your CRM software may provide you with the whole spectrum of information. You'll connect the dots to find out which keywords were most effective in leading prospects to your business. You'll figure out which Facebook or Instagram ads shine brighter than others by tracking social media traffic.

Source: Statista

Let's check out which options may be available for you when you explore the customer journey with CRM:

• Multi-touch attribution to define the value of every interaction
• Track SEO calls so you can stick to the best-performing keywords on your pages
• Phone conversation recording and transcription of conversations
• Traces to social media campaigns
• AI analysis of customer behavior, quality of team performance, trends, etc.
• Call data from PPC** **to estimate the ROI and effectiveness of your placements

It's most likely that you already have a CRM system for your business. Why won't you also use it to gain insights into your paid traffic calls?

Final Thoughts on How to Track Calls Effectively

It's up to you how exactly to track inbound phone calls, but one thing is clear: the right call tracking software suite can be extremely effective at replacing spreadsheets and manual tracking in general. Likewise, you can combine different call tracking methods for different traffic channels. For example, you may track calls from social media with software and check out your PPC results using Google Analytics tools.