To understand how your marketing efforts are resulting in revenue marketing departments need one tracking tool for online and offline channels. This has been one of the biggest challenges in marketing as more and more tools come to market. As we have covered, marketing attribution is the process of identifying a set of user actions (“events” or “touchpoints”) that contribute in some manner to a desired outcome, and then assigning a value to each of these events. Marketing attribution provides a level of understanding of what combination of events in what order influence individuals to engage in a desired behavior, typically referred to as a conversion. These conversions can be outcomes such as filling out a form on a website, purchasing a product and even a phone call. A phone call could be a touchpoint in the attribution model or could be considered a conversion if an outcome is a sale or a qualified lead.

What Kind of Data Can and Should be Tracked?

• Where did the call originate: this includes the advertisement, campaign, and keyword search – and pages and content on the site the caller viewed before and after calling.
• Who called: What is their phone number, their geographic location, the day and time of the call, and, length of call and more.
• Intent of Call: What was the caller’s intent – did they purchase a product? Did they sign up for more information?

What is Dynamic Number Insertion (DNI)?

Dynamic phone number insertion (DNI) is a process that marketers use to measure the impact of digital efforts on inbound phone calls. When a lead clicks though to your site from any advertisement, DNI technology displays a number that’s unique to the specific search engine, web page, keyword or other sources. Using DNI is essential to completing the attribution path of your customers. Call providers can pass this information to attribution platforms via a Webhook. Once this information is passed, all past activities are linked up via cookies and completes the attribution path.

Wrap Up

Call tracking is essential to fully understand how marketing budgets are spent across all channels. We have personally worked with many companies who use call tracking and we have seen upwards of 40-60% of conversions happening on the phone and not on the website. As a marketer, you need to know where and how people are converting. If your business utilizing phone calls it is essential to add tracking to these events or you’re just wasting your budget.