How to Integrate Inbound Call Tracking With Online Analytics

For many marketers who rely on the phone, life is like living in Germany -- before the wall came down.

On one side of the wall -- the click side -- life is rich with data. You can track inbound traffic, its sources, its path through your site, and its progress through your funnel. The other side of the wall, however -- the call side -- is data poor. You get calls to your business, but you don’t know where they came from, and it's hard to track them.

Today, there's good news for marketers straddling both sides of the wall. The wall is coming down!

A new class of software tools allows you to actually track incoming calls almost the same way as you track clicks.

Why Call Tracking Is Crucial for Marketers

A recent comScore study commissioned by Google concluded that 63% of website visitors completed their purchases offline.

Think about that -- it means that a majority of website visitors who make purchases start the process on one side of the data wall (the data-rich, web-based side), then end the process on the other, whether it's in a brick-and-mortar store, or on the data-poor, phone-based side. That means all the marketing effort going into attracting and nurturing website visitors is not properly being accounted for. In order to more properly understand your customers' buying cycles, and to understand which marketing dollars are truly driving sales, you need to break down the wall. You need to set up call tracking. 

How Does Call Tracking Work?

There are a number of new tools that allow marketers to implement call tracking. Here's a typical process for setting up and using it:

First, you'll need to set up the app by following steps like the ones below:

Install the call tracking app. (HubSpot users, for example, can visit the App Marketplace and install HubSpot RingRevenue App.)Install a simple piece of javascript to your website (a one-minute job); then tag the phone numbers on your site that you want to track.

Once these two setup steps are done, you're ready to track calls. Here's how that typically works:

When a new prospect comes to your site after the javascript and tags are set up, they’ll see a new phone number.When the prospect calls the new phone number, your call tracking app should be begin tracking the caller. (If you're using the HubSpot RingRevenue app, RingRevenue will create a lead in HubSpot for the call; at the same time, it will drop a cookie on the caller’s site so it can track the caller's activity on your site. It will then add that to the caller's lead record in HubSpot. See the image below.)

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