5 essential call tracking metrics

Category: Data and analytics

Did you know that 61% of customers prefer to get in touch by phone?

It means the way you track and measure the performance of your phone calls is crucial for understanding the true ROI of your lead generation efforts.

Today, marketers have tons of valuable data to analyse. But there’s only so much we can do in a working day.

And when time is tight, you need to be ruthlessly efficient in how you spend your time. Especially when it comes to campaign analytics and reporting.

So this got me thinking: if we only had time to monitor five call tracking metrics, what would they be?

Call tracking metric 1: Source call volumes

Understanding which sources drive telephone calls is vital because it allows you to make informed strategic marketing decisions and allocate budget effectively.

Never fear! You can do this easily with dynamic phone numbers on your website.

Using dynamic phone numbers to track and monitor website visitors means you’ll see every person who lands on your website and know at what point they call you. This allows you to track the movements of each visitor from source – a PPC ad, for example – through your website to the point of conversion.

Image of call sources as a call tracking metric

Dynamic numbers on your website have clear advantages over static numbers, such as:

  • Knowing which sources are responsible for generating the most calls, enabling you to adapt your marketing spend and strategy
  • Tracking the relative performance of each campaign, even when they have similar messaging

Do you see the column heading ‘VCR’ in the screenshot above? This stands for ‘visitor to call ratio’ – we’ll look at this in more detail in call tracking metric #4.

Call tracking metric 2: Keyword performance

You, or your paid search agency, put tons of time and effort into tweaking your keyword stock to create a high-performing channel.

An easy way to drive greater success here is by attributing calls to keywords. This allows you to understand the performance of your business-as-usual search terms. What’s more, it helps you identify new keywords to focus on – before your competitors wise-up to them.

Speech analytics is great for uncovering new keywords, too. It allows you to listen in on phone conversations and identify the words and phrases that customers use to describe their challenges and the potential solutions they’re looking for.

But what if your keywords aren’t delivering the results you need?

You may have a high cost keyword that doesn’t appear to be delivering leads, for example. In actual fact, the keyword may be generating leads, but they could be from phone calls that aren’t being attributed.

Tracking calls against keywords gives you far greater accuracy in your paid search reports.

Call tracking metric 3: Landing page effectiveness

We’ve all launched campaigns and gone to great effort to optimise our landing pages. We may also have variations of landing pages to A/B test and identify the best performing layout, content, or design.

However, tracking phone calls that come in via those landing pages – often the very aim of the page – is often forgotten about.

As a result, a campaign that actually generates a lot of phone leads may be incorrectly dismissed as a failure.

Remember that 60% of your customers prefer phone calls, while only 24% prefer to use email or chat. If you’re only gathering data from your online conversions, you’ll miss out on vital performance data.

Call tracking metric 4: Visitor to call ratio (VCR)

You might have a source or channel producing lower than average visitor traffic, but a higher than average cost per visitor. It would be easy to dismiss this source and divert your budget away from it.

Not so fast! What if the ratio of calls the source produced was three or four times the level of other sources? You’d trade a higher call rate for a lower visitor rate from a source, wouldn’t you?

That’s why VCR is so important. It identifies the sources responsible for effectively delivering high-quality phone leads. And it allows you to separate these sources from ones that purely generate visitor volume.

Call tracking metric 5: Expected revenue from calls

The ultimate metrics out of all the call tracking metrics: how many calls did we receive, and how much revenue resulted from those calls? It’s easier to calculate than you think.

Call tracking allows you to attribute your phone calls to a campaign, an ad or even to a keyword in your CRM or lead capture platform – whether that’s a fancy system like Salesforce or a simple spreadsheet.

Here, we’ve captured leads, attributed them to a marketing source and tracked their value in the CRM:

Image of sales funnel as a call tracking metric

As each lead moves through your pre-defined flow to ‘closed’, you can report on the exact amount of revenue each channel produces. This includes leads that come in as telephone enquiries.

Bringing it together

Having one dashboard makes it simple to keep track of these core metrics. A dashboard should be quick and easy to review, and make reporting an interesting and informative part of your day – and definitely not a frustrating chore!

In Mediahawk, dashboards are really easy to set up, especially thanks to our integrations with many of the world’s most popular marketing tools.

You simply choose the metrics you want to display in your dashboard. You can even set up recurring automated emails to deliver campaign reports directly to your inbox whenever you want them.

Image of Mediahawk KPI call tracking dashboard report.

Unfortunately, there are only so many hours in the day. And you can only keep an eye on so many KPIs. But hopefully we’ve given you some powerful tracking ideas that will help you stay on top of your elusive telephone leads.

This article was first published in April 2020, and updated in October 2022.

About the author - Michael Morrell

CEO of Mediahawk and a specialist in marketing and telephone analytics. Michael has over 20 years’ experience advising businesses how to use marketing analytics to increase revenue through better capture, tracking and attribution of marketing leads. Prior to founding Mediahawk, Michael worked in the media, industrial and defence sectors.

Graphic representing call tracking software
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