The marketer’s guide to inbound call tracking (2025)

If you want to track your campaign performance with more accuracy and optimise your marketing return on investment (ROI), then you need to be monitoring and analysing your inbound calls.

While digital campaign analytics are important, phone calls remain a crucial touchpoint for high-value conversions, and bridging the gap between these online and offline campaigns is the only way to get the whole picture of your marketing performance.

This is where inbound call tracking becomes essential for comprehensive attribution of your phone calls, revealing the true value of your campaigns in driving conversions.

In this article, we’ll break down what inbound call tracking is and why it’s a crucial component in successful marketing.

What is inbound call tracking?

To understand what inbound call tracking is, it’s good to know what inbound calls are. These are simply phone calls you receive from customers – as opposed to outbound calls that you make to customers.

Inbound call tracking is the process of capturing and analysing incoming calls to attribute them to specific marketing activities. This allows you to identify which campaigns and channels are driving the most phone calls, and receive actionable insights for optimising your campaigns to increase conversions.

The best way to do this is through inbound call tracking software, such as Mediahawk. This system provides a clear and user-friendly approach to tracking every customer call and uncovering opportunities to further increase conversions, refine marketing strategies, and improve the customer experience.

Why marketers need inbound call tracking

Effective marketing strategies require accurate attribution, and this is only achieved through visibility into all customer conversion pathways – not just digital touchpoints.

Inbound call tracking provides the missing piece of the attribution puzzle, allowing you to connect offline conversions back to their originating campaigns, so you have a holistic view of your marketing strengths and weaknesses.

Understanding the customer journey through call data

Analysing call data reveals the touchpoints that influence your phone call conversions. Inbound call tracking allows you to map the complete customer journey from awareness to decision-making, highlighting the key campaigns that contribute to a conversion.

For example, you might identify several customers who called directly from a specific social media campaign, or a large volume of customers who eventually called after visiting a certain landing page as their first point of contact.

Both instances reveal a key touchpoint at different stages in the customer journey, and understanding the impact of different touchpoints in complex journeys will help you increase conversions across multiple channels.

Proving and optimising marketing ROI

Inbound call tracking also enables you to prove the ROI of your marketing spend by measuring the true effectiveness of your strategies – including pay-per-click (PPC), search engine optimisation (SEO), social media, and various other strategies.

For example, you might discover that targeting either broader awareness terms or more niche brand terms in your landing page copy results in increased calls. You will also see how many customers called after landing on your website from the search engine results page (SERP), indicating the effectiveness of your keyword targeting in improving SEO visibility. This will offer guidance on how you should be structuring your on-page keyword targeting across different landing pages to increase phone calls.

This comprehensive data means you can justify marketing spend with confidence and reallocate budget to the highest-performing channels and campaigns.

Key benefits of inbound call tracking for marketers

There are various benefits to using inbound call tracking in your marketing strategies, ranging from keyword-level attribution to geo-targeting insights:

1. Keyword-level attribution: Optimising PPC and SEO strategies

Inbound call tracking solutions will identify which specific keywords are driving not just your PPC clicks, but actual phone call conversions. This granular insight enables precise optimisation of PPC campaigns and SEO strategies to focus on terms with proven conversion value.

With your paid ads, for example, you can uncover the specific keywords customers searched before they called you. Use this to more effectively structure your keywords for Google Ads, so you receive the highest number of calls with the lowest possible spend on relevant keywords – without wasting spend on keywords that aren’t delivering conversions.

This insight provides a more effective way to split your marketing budget, and in turn, receive a better ROI for your PPC campaigns.

2. Call intent analysis: Understanding why prospects call

Analysing inbound phone call recordings and transcripts will also provide insights into not just which customers called, but why. Speech analytics software – a feature of inbound call tracking – allows you to dissect phone call conversations to highlight customer pain points, enquiries, and motivations.

You’ll spot the patterns in high-value calls so you can refine your campaigns to attract more prospects and buyers – such as identifying common queries and addressing them in your messaging.

3. Dynamic number insertion: Tracking campaign performance

Dynamic number insertion (DNI) technology automatically displays unique phone numbers to visitors based on how they arrived on your website. You can then precisely track which channels and campaigns are driving phone conversions without needing to manually configure data for each campaign.

For instance, a paid search campaign promoting a limited-time offer can use DNI to measure both online form submissions and phone calls generated. This comprehensive view reveals the true ROI of the campaign, which might be significantly higher (or lower) than digital-only metrics would suggest.

4. Geo-targeting insights: Location-based marketing optimisation

Inbound call tracking provides valuable data on calls in different locations, revealing geographic trends in call volume and conversion rates.

For example, you may have three different business locations across the UK, and you want to accurately track the volume of calls generated by each area. This will help highlight which location is driving the most conversions, and also reveals opportunities to focus your local targeted campaigns on specific messaging to further increase leads and sales.

For instance, certain channels (like social media, PPC, or email campaigns) might be more effective at driving calls in specific locations, which will indicate how you should refine each local strategy.

Why marketers choose Mediahawk for inbound call tracking

Selecting the right inbound call tracking software is crucial for success in your marketing strategies. The platform must provide accurate attribution, integrate seamlessly with your existing marketing software, and deliver actionable insights to increase your leads, sales, and ROI.

Mediahawk offers a comprehensive inbound call tracking solution that combines attribution capabilities with intuitive reporting and detailed insights. You’ll gain extensive multi-touch attribution, cross-channel reporting with Parameter Connect, phone call conversation intelligence, and seamless customer relationship management (CRM) integration.

Mediahawk allows you to close the loop between online activities and offline conversions, for the most accurate picture of your marketing performance.

Final thoughts

Inbound call tracking has evolved into an essential component of successful marketing, which your business needs to stay competitive in your sector.

By connecting digital marketing efforts to phone conversions, you’ll gain the insights needed to optimise campaign messaging, improve customer experiences, and maximise ROI. You’ll know which channels, messages, and keywords drive not just calls but qualified phone call conversations, so you can generate more effective campaigns that resonate with your highest-value prospects.