Call tracking: What is it, and why does 5 Fold do it?

A few weeks back, we wrote about how we’re constantly working to improve our marketing campaigns. From that post: “Great marketing often takes experimentation, and our team often needs to test new elements and strategy.” But, how does 5 Fold gather data on what is working and what isn’t? How do we know what to experiment with, in general?

In this week’s blog post, we’ll discuss how one data-gathering method—call tracking—works, why we use it, and how we apply the data we gather from it to our all-in-one marketing campaigns.

What is call tracking?

Call tracking may sound like some secretive form of detective work or something out of a spy novel, but it’s actually quite simple. Call tracking is just using multiple phone numbers to better differentiate where calls are originating.

Many businesses today are advertising in print media (such as newspapers), over the radio ways, though TV commercials, and on the web, including on the company’s website, through social media platforms, and in pay-per-click search engine ads. With only one phone number across all of those forms of communication, how can you tell which ones are working? As 5 Fold Marketing Director Bijo George puts it: “Marketing attribution is a big problem since there are many marketing channels and devices a user can visit your website from. Having call tracking enabled helps us track each channel and make better decisions.”

For example, if you use the same phone number on your print ads and your PPC search engine ads, wouldn’t it be useful to know that 100% of the calls are being generated by PPC, and not print? Using that information, you could adjust your campaign and take money out of print ads and put them toward PPC.

That’s essentially how call tracking works. By assigning each platform a different phone number (generated by software), 5 Fold can tell our clients which numbers are driving client calls and leads, and which are not. This can either lead to the reassignment of spending described above or, in the case of a website that isn’t generating many calls, changes to improve the site and create better outcomes.

What types of sources does 5 Fold track for our clients?

We use call tracking on a variety of platforms, including:

• Organic Search: Google, Yahoo, Bing
• Paid Search: Google, Bing, Ad Extensions
• Social: Facebook
• Direct Visitors
• Website
• Referral
• Off-site sources: Print, Radio, TV

What do we do with the data we collect?

Thanks to the software we use, 5 Fold can actually determine where calls are coming from down to the keyword level. This is because we perform A/B testing between otherwise-identical pages that use different keywords, to see which ones are likelier to generate phone calls. This process gets repeated again and again to determine which keywords and marketing methods are working best. This is data of particular interest to the SEO department (responsible for on-site SEO), our PPC team (to know what keywords are resonating with the target demographic, and our content department, which is responsible for drafting more pages for the client’s website.

In other words, call tracking allows us to gather data that we use to further optimize the campaigns of our clients. Doing so allows us to take what we know about marketing and national trends and test those ideas at the localized level to build better and better results—and more calls for our clients.

Give 5 Fold a call

If you’d like to learn more about call tracking and our all-in-one marketing packages, give 5 Fold a call, or get in contact with us online. We’d love to hear from you!