OpportunitiesStrategicCallTrackingMarketers spend thousands of dollars annually on their web presence, and other landing and campaign pages, to get their products and services visible in the digital space. But that's not all. These sites only add value to the company if the relevant visitors actually see the content and, in that way, bring traffic.

Depending on the company and brand, this often costs a fortune when you factor in placing, for example, Google Ads, banners, and newsletters, and the spending doesn’t stop there. Investments in the six-figure range are not uncommon to implement measures that then convert this traffic into conversions.

From movement data to login activities to shopping carts, all channels and data are tracked and analyzed, but these strategies often lack a communication channel. As a result, companies lose significant optimization potential which could have generated significant competitive advantages. Nevertheless, the top three opportunities marketers can create with call tracking are as follows:

Make calls for online marketing more tangible

What is not tangible and measurable usually does not work and has no value in the eyes of marketers. Therefore, especially in times of increasing digitization, they are real analytics fanatics whose maxim is “track, analyze, optimize, repeat”.

But what good is this approach if important information cannot be mapped so easily? Especially with calls where the measuring chain breaks down?

To prevent this, those responsible can rely on strategic call tracking solutions that close this seemingly unbridgeable gap. This is the only way to make all online marketing campaigns and touchpoints in the customer journey tangible and to understand how they work in the marketing process. If marketers don't do this, they lack a complete set of data to determine their campaign efficiency and to recognize which digital communication channels really work – and which don't.

Generate the right feed for Google

Marketing decision-makers should always focus on providing Google with information that is truly relevant to their business. Because the algorithms running in the search engine decide which searcher gets to see which results. However, since every AI has to be trained first for its task, it is important to collect this information and then consistently and continuously transfer it to the system. This is the only way Google can assign users to the content of a company.

Call tracking is an ideal tool for this: If marketers have identified the “phone call” touchpoint in their customer journey as an important starting point for conversations between customers and brands, they can collect the data with the tracking tool and integrate it directly and seamlessly into Google (especially into the new Google Analytics 4) via an interface. In this way, they make all important information about generated call conversions visible there. Only then does the AI know which users are most interesting for a company.

This is how marketers increase the efficiency of their Google spends, because if the call data is continuously tracked correctly, enriched with own data if necessary, and then made available to Google in a structured way, the algorithm can better identify the best candidate for the appropriate content or requests for a played-out call – that is, for whom the budget is spent. The better this process is set up, the more efficient the spending.

Make analogue campaigns visible

Brands print QR codes or URLs on their posters, flyers or magazine ads to measure the advertising impact of certain measures. So, they try to convert these analogue campaigns into digital ones and make them visible to their analytics tools. But what happens when the most relevant customer journey turns out differently than expected? For instance, if digital is not important for the user? What if the target audience would rather pick up the phone and talk to a real person than visit a website first? In these cases, a concrete measure of campaign success remains invisible, even though it could be significant and lead to better marketing decisions.

The gap between the physical and the digital world seems unbridgeable – at least when it comes to telephony - but call tracking can be a simple solution:

With technology, offline campaigns can be seamlessly integrated into the tracking and analysis tools used and made measurable. Marketing managers only have to print campaign-specific (digital) telephone numbers on their offline measures. Generated calls can then be integrated directly into the analytics tools and assigned directly to the campaign as a conversion. This allows the performance of the advertising medium to be precisely evaluated. With the insights generated in this way, marketers are then optimizing their online marketing strategies, which ultimately leads to more efficiency in terms of the resources used.

Call tracking also offers companies an opportunity for other reasons. If you look into the future, for example, the integration of artificial intelligence into these systems opens up many more possibilities. In this way, the technology can develop into a real booster for the customer experience: e.g., an AI could analyze conversations between service employees in real time and suggest wording tips, brand messages tailored to the customer or reading recommendations. The result is a truly powerful tool that helps business decision makers from all functional areas make better business decisions and sell more.

By MediaBUZZ