Call analytics is the collection, measurement, and analysis of phone call data. In marketing, call analytics is a great way to measure the reach of your business or a specific campaign – you can use your call analytics to understands which advertising efforts are directing calls to your business.
Virtual phone numbers go one step further and ease the tracking of marketing through different mediums. For example, if you send out marketing materials via email, PPC ads, and direct mail, all using a unique toll free number, you can quickly and easily measure which technique has driven the most leads.
For a more detailed understanding of your website call data, you can also track phone calls in Google Analytics. Here, we’ll be talking through the ways you can track your inbound calls to better understand your customers and make more informed marketing decisions.
Why Should You Track Call Analytics on Your Website?
If you’re a business owner or going to do a business registration, tracking and analyzing visits to your website is a must to help you make informed marketing decisions, tracking and analyzing visits to your website is a must to help you make informed marketing decisions. The best way to do this is through Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a free platform that provides an abundance of information including organic traffic, bounce rates, clicks, and site entry/exit points, so you can analyze where your traffic is directed and how users are interacting with your website, ultimately using this information to improve marketing efforts.
As well as all this, you can also use Google Analytics for phone conversion tracking. With GA you can track calls that come in via your website, and view information such as the caller device and location – more information that will help you optimize your marketing strategy.
How to Track Phone Calls in Google Analytics
Once you have Google Analytics installed, you can begin to track phone calls from your website by setting up Events and Goals. Google Analytics uses ‘events’ to track any interactions that a user makes when they visit your site. This could be ways of accessing the site, for example via an ad, or actions a user carries out when on the page, such as downloading a piece of content.
You can set up GA to log any event of your choosing, depending on the information you want to collect about your website. This includes event tracking for phone calls – you simply need to set your website phone number as a clickable action for users. You (or a developer) will then need to place a piece of coding around the phone number within the HTML of your website admin that will trigger this event. You can visit the Google Analytics Developers page for more information on how to add an event tracking code.
You can also adapt the event so it suits your business and your own unique goals. One example is by setting a minimum call length before the event is triggered and tracked as a conversion. By setting a minimum length, you can filter out any shorter calls that may not offer valuable actions for your business, such as a sale.
Once your event is set up, Google Analytics phone tracking will log each time a user dials your number from your website when using a mobile device. From this, you can access a wealth of information about your callers. As well as caller location and device, GA can help you trace phone calls back to the original source. In simpler terms, you can see how and why the caller landed on your website in the first place; did they click through via a social media campaign, did they click a link in an email, or did they find your website through organic rankings? With this information, you can work out which channels are bringing you direct leads. Focusing your strategy on your most successful channels ensures efficient use of your marketing budget and is the fastest way of growing your business.
How Google Call Tracking Can Help Your Business
The information you gather through inbound call tracking will help you understand your customers – not only who they are, but how they are interacting with your business.
The information from Google Analytics call tracking events will show you which channels are bringing the most direct leads for your business, helping you understand which marketing efforts are currently the most effective. For example, if most of your phone calls are being tracked back to PPC ads, you know you’re getting a good ROI on ad spend. On the other hand, if you notice barely any calls being tracked back to organic, you may decide you need to place a higher focus on SEO in future marketing. This visibility into which channels translate into direct leads and phone calls allows you a much clearer overview of which areas of marketing are performing well for your business, and which need a little more attention.
As well as providing vital information on marketing efforts, analytical phone tracking also offers useful information about your audience and customers. You can use device tracking to see which devices your customers are calling from, then cater your marketing to that device.
Location information is also highly useful. For example, you may notice a large number of quality calls coming from one particular location. You can then use this to target your marketing to that specific area. This may mean tailoring your keywords to the city, creating a local landing page, or setting up a direct, local phone number for that area.
The key to success in any business is understanding your customers. With Google Analytics call tracking, you can learn valuable information about both your customers and your marketing channels, using this to tailor your efforts in a way that will help your business grow.
