These days, your number one ally in the world of business is your website.

An optimized, well laid out site with excellent content can generate tens, hundreds, or even thousands of views and clicks each day. And if you’re lucky, potential customers might even fill out a contact form or reach out to you via email.

But what’s better than clicks and emails? The direct communication that comes with a phone call is much better, and thanks to some cool new technology, the call and person who made it can even be tracked back to your website.

About a decade ago, this technology came on the market. It’s only recently, however, that I’ve seen B2B companies starting to include phone call leads as an ROI metric. Humble brag, we may have played a role in that as this is a strategy we’re implementing with several of our clients.

Call tracking is a relatively inexpensive tool which also scales well to the size of your call volume. With its ability to drive a significant number of leads and sales that, without call tracking, were likely to have been lost, it’s surprising that call tracking isn’t a standard practice for every B2B marketing team today.

Fortunately, It’s not hard to get it going.

Here’s a quick overview of what you need to know and do to get call tracking started.

“Your call is very important to us. Please don’t hang up.”

When someone goes to the trouble of calling you directly instead of filling out a simple contact form, it usually means the person wants to accelerate the sales process. But since the telephone is one of the widest lead-generating funnels, it normally doesn’t have a way of separating lead-related calls from all of the others, unlike how it’s done using an online form.

Completing and submitting an online form generally shows a legitimate interest in that particular subject matter. And knowing what specific content they’re interested in allows you to determine whether the time is right to follow up on the lead.

But a phone call that leaves you with nothing more than a return number doesn’t provide direct insight into the caller’s intentions—or, at least, it didn’t before call tracking was available.

With call tracking, attribution and context are now easy to quantify.

Quantifying phone conversations: Number Tracking

As business needs have evolved, so has their supporting technology. Phone number tracking software has not only become relatively more common in the last few years, it’s also easier to implement.

New tracking software now captures a wide variety of data points, from the moment someone calls the phone number on your website to the time when the caller hangs up. Furthermore, call sourcing has become so sophisticated that a site can give each user a unique number to call. This number redirects to your actual number seamlessly, which leaves your user unaffected, while ensuring you that this call certainly did come from your website—not from anywhere else.

Some of the key data points include:

  • Company Name (if recorded in the software’s database)
  • Length of Call
  • Page the user was on when the call was made
  • Keyword used for paid-search call
  • Full recording of the call
  • And more.

From here, you can combine and analyze the data to determine how (and if) the caller fits a particular persona.

Some questions to consider:

  • What is the company they’re calling from? Have I done my research on this company?
  • Have they called before? Is this a repeated attempt to reach out to us?
  • From what page are they calling? A whitepaper landing page, or from a blog post?
  • What keyword did they search for to get to our page? Do I know the ad campaign associated with that keyword?

You may notice a trend from this list—all the questions aim to identify the potential customer’s needs and where your company can fulfill them. Capturing the company name allows you to customize your sales-qualification process, based on what you know about where your users come from. Also knowing what content they viewed, or the keyword they used, gives you a context for determining their particular interest, along with where they are in the buying cycle.

If the information is enough to identify the user as a potential qualified lead, its then up to the sales team to take the next step.

Ready to set up call tracking for your own company? Well, why not start by giving us a call?