Marketing agencies: Make your clients’ budgets work harder with call tracking

Given the need for every pound of marketing spend to generate the maximum revenue, you need to be able to invest in the best performing channels for your clients. This will help you drive the results your clients are looking for, and also help with your retention, something all marketing agencies strive for.

Tighter budgets mean the marketing landscape is increasingly competitive. And in such a marketplace, it’s no surprise that 84% of marketers now rank lead generation as their number one objective. So, it’s now more important than ever to make sure that your clients’ marketing budgets are working as hard as they can; leveraging every opportunity and maximising every lead. One way to do this is to use call tracking software to evaluate your marketing campaign performance.

To put it simply, call tracking software allows you to track the source of your inbound phone call enquiries. But, it can do so much more. Call tracking data is used to track and monitor the effectiveness of your marketing activity, identify the marketing channels that are driving the most calls, and measure the true return on investment (ROI) of your marketing efforts. Surprisingly, this is something that not even Google Analytics 4 (GA4) can give you. GA4 has no way of capturing offline conversions unless you use call tracking software to push that data into the reports.

GA4 has no way of capturing offline conversions unless you use call tracking software to push that data into the reports.

So, here’s what you need to know about how call tracking can help make your clients’ budgets work harder and deliver more results. And, we’ve included some tips for choosing the right call tracking software for your clients.

The benefits of call tracking software for your agency

There are many benefits to using call tracking software for your agency, but here are just three of the most important:

1. Tracking the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns

By accurately tracking how effective your marketing campaigns are, it’s easier to determine which marketing channels are driving the most leads. While many channels have their own way of tracking leads, such as clicks from PPC, these don’t always give the full picture as to which lead has converted into a successful sale.

Using call tracking helps you to understand what campaigns, channels, and user journeys are driving leads that convert. This data can be used to then optimise your marketing campaigns to ensure that the budget is being used in the most effective way possible and attracting the right customers.

2. Accurate measurement, accountability, and actionable results

Being able to accurately quantify the ROI of your marketing efforts, of each campaign and channel, and demonstrating to your clients how their investment is paying off, is vital in securing future marketing budgets. For example, you might see strong high-level results in Google Ads, but these aren’t translating into leads for your clients. By only looking at surface-level metrics, such as the number of conversions your Google Ads account reports, you could be optimising campaigns for the wrong type of calls – such as customer service enquiries or even wrong numbers – resulting in a huge waste of budget, and unhappy clients.

The biggest problem we see with a lot of analytics is that they’re vanity metrics – numbers we’re used to reporting because it’s familiar and expected. Without context, there’s no real actionable data there. If your clients’ website visits are increasing, but website conversion rate is declining, you can drill down into the reasons why – going right down into very granular detail, including listening to the call to see how it was handled.

Without context, there’s no real actionable data there. If your clients’ website visits are increasing, but website conversion rate is declining, you can drill down into the reasons why – going right down into very granular detail, including listening to the call to see how it was handled.

Accurate call tracking gives you that context. It measures campaign performance by channel and platform, compares conversions, spend, and revenue for each. So, as well as being able to provide you with the insight you need to make decisions, it also provides assurance to board and c-suite to justify future marketing spend.

3. Identifying opportunities and ideation

As well as providing accurate tracking and measurement, your call tracking data is instrumental in spotting trends in the types of calls your clients are getting. These trends can then help you make sure your marketing campaigns are aligned with what the audience is looking for right now as well as generating ideas for new content.

For example, a care home who think their focus should be on long term residential care might suddenly start getting more enquiries for respite care. By monitoring and analysing the keywords that are driving these enquiries, this gives you the knowledge and confidence to adapt your campaign strategy to maximise any opportunities that present themselves.

Using speech analytics also enables you to quickly identify and categorise the calls you’re receiving based on keywords, allowing you to see the content of conversations at a glance by scanning the categories. How you then use that data is key. For instance, once you have your categories, you can use these to create custom audiences in Google Ads which enables you to build more targeted remarking campaigns.

Tips for choosing the right call tracking software for your clients

Whether your clients have asked you to provide a call tracking solution, or if you have identified a need for it, there are a few factors you should keep in mind:

The features the platform offers

It’s important to make sure the software you select offers the features your clients need and works with their preferred channels and marketing technology stack. Some of the most important features to look for include:

• Speech analytics: including call transcripts, keyword spotting, and automatic categorisation of calls based on keywords.
• Advanced call handling: call recordings (and automatic redaction of sensitive data), the ability to set your own custom times and destination numbers based on your opening hours, mid-call divert to transfer live calls to another person, interactive voice response (IVR) to re-route and segment callers based on priority or department.
• Integrations: can it integrate seamlessly straight out of the box with your most used marketing technology, can be customised using an API or webhooks, can pass multiple data points into your other tech platforms.
• Comprehensive reports: they’re detailed, visual, easy to understand, you can easily download the data and share the reports, create custom dashboards based on the data specific team members want to see, you can see reliable real-time data.

How easy and intuitive it is to use

Useability of the platform plays a valuable role in the effectiveness of tracking and measurement. If you need to do extra work manually to pull together your reports, or if it’s a clunky system to use, it’s going to put users off. The software itself should be very intuitive, so that you’re not wasting time trying to read the reports or find the data you’re looking for.

It should also be simple to implement dynamic call tracking on your clients’ website – you shouldn’t need a developer to do this. The quickest and easiest way to do this in-house is using Google Tag Manager. It should also be ‘set and forget’ – you shouldn’t need to change the call tracking set up in order to access new features.

The customer support the company offers

As important as the software itself, is the team behind it. A good support team are enthusiastic about the software and your clients, they’re eager to learn about your objectives, ensuring that tracking is working effectively, and is capturing the right data for them. Customer support and reliability are also important. Clients change objectives and priorities according to business and demand. A flexible and reliable Client Excellence team supporting both you and your clients can ensure that changes are made swiftly and efficiently, allowing you to focus on delivering leads and ROI for your clients.

Do more with less – and still get results

When you know what’s driving your conversions for your clients, you can create more targeted, cost-effective campaigns that really drive results – and prove your agency’s worth.