A question I sometimes hear from business owners goes something like this: “Do we really need call tracking? It seems like an extra expense we can do without?” This provides an interesting perspective to talk about the benefits of call tracking, as well as an opportunity to discuss the potential negative repercussions of not doing it! When clients have brought up call tracking in the past, I use the following three reasons to explain why it’s absolutely critical to do. 1. Google Business Profile Insights Only Track Calls from MobileWe already know that Google Business Profile (formerly known as Google My Business) is a critical component of a local business’s existence. So it’s important to be able to assess how the Business Profile is performing, and how it’s contributing to business growth—or lack thereof. If you’re relying on Google Business Profile (GBP) Insights data, you’re only capturing calls that customers make from a mobile device. Therefore this data isn’t an accurate reflection of all calls that your business will get from GBP. Anyone pulling up the listing on a computer before calling the business wouldn’t be counted in this data. Here’s a recent example comparing one month of GBP Insights vs Call Tracking Metrics data for the same business during the same month: As you can see, if we weren’t doing call tracking, we would’ve missed the additional 54 calls made to the business. Keep in mind, Google Business Profile Insights don’t represent unique visitors, so multiple searches or clicks from the same user would count multiple times. Being able to segment the data by unique calls is another benefit of call tracking. 2. You Can Record CallsListening to calls might be time consuming and boring, but it can provide valuable benefits and uncover potential issues with a business. In a previous article on local SEO reporting, I shared an example of when we listened to the calls of one of our clients and discovered something that was having a negative impact. During the phone calls, a virtual assistant (VA) for Mr Smith (made up name), a personal injury and criminal attorney, was asked a simple question from many different potential clients. The question was, “What practice areas and types of cases does Mr. Smith take on?” What was the VA’s response to this question? It was, “I’m not sure. But I’ll double check and get back to you.” You better believe that these potential clients ended up choosing another law firm! We reviewed this with the client and he was then able to train his staff to correct the issue. Now that’s what I call going beyond SEO to become a partner to the businesses that we work with. Warning! Never listen to your clients calls without their consent. If call tracking is used, the client should be the one to own the account and set it up. 3. You Can Label Calls to Assess QualityAnother benefit of listening to call recordings is you can set up a system for labeling calls. This enables you to have better insights into the quality of the calls, and while the setup can be time consuming, the benefits are well worth the squeeze. We’ve taken this on for some clients and trained the staff of other businesses so that they can do this effectively themselves. The first step is to come up with a taxonomy so you can build a ‘call label legend’. This allows you to be consistent, efficient, and effective when going through this process multiple times each year. Here’s a sample legend with the taxonomy we use:
After you’ve created your taxonomy, you can start to listen to the calls and devise a system to label them. This system will allow you to create a filter for your reports based on the labels that you apply to the calls. Here’s a sample report that we shared with a client: Creating these reports gives us an opportunity to offer our clients additional insights into the calls that we’re driving from our efforts. For example, if the client tells us that their sales are down, and we notice that 30% of their calls are going to voicemail or hanging up, that’s relevant and insightful information to share with the client. How We Set Up Call Tracking at Sterling SkyWe typically use Call Tracking Metrics or Call Rail with all of the businesses we work with. In my experience, they’re very similar but also have their own nuances that can take some getting used to. I’m not going to get into the subtle differences in this article. Instead, I’ll walk you through the things we think about when setting up a new call tracking account. The examples I’ll use are mainly from Call Tracking Metrics. As I mentioned in the disclaimer above, we always instruct our clients to set up their own call tracking accounts. Here’s what a typical email to a new client might look like: “To properly track your phone calls from ads and/or organic traffic, please set up an account at https://ift.tt/3yqm0tB and email me your login. This will allow me to help track your ROI and make sure we are spending time and money in the place that will give you the best return. You will only need the Business Plan.” Once the business signs up and shares the login information, we’re ready to get the account set up. Here are the typical steps that we go through for Call Tracking Metrics, and the same general rules apply to Call Rail:
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