Measure Marketing with Call Tracking

Updated March 3, 2025

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Attribution, Clicks & Contacts

It’s not always clear where a lead comes from. Setting up some kind of lead attribution, especially for digital marketing efforts, is needed to determine what’s working and what’s not. Do you know what caused a lead to fill out a form on your website or call you from their mobile phone? If the answer is no or I’m not sure, that read on. We think call tracking is mandatory to measure organic search as well as paid advertising sources.

If your website has a phone number, one small part of tracking your marketing attribution is call tracking. Call tracking is what you think it is: software that collects data when a call is made to your site, giving you as much information about the contact as it can.

What Can Call Tracking Do?

Call tracking software tracks, records, and analyzes phone calls and helps identify the marketing channels that make your phone ring. Most of the software available in the market at the moment provides a call tracking plugin that dynamically swaps the phone number displayed on the website, depending on where the visitor came from. Typically a call tracking service will allocate a pool of phone numbers and rotate them.

Note: many clients are uncomfortable with this at first. The worry is that customers will store this phone number for future calls rather than their standard main contact number. To allay these fears, we first need to look at changing consumer behavior. Google has found that most consumers use the click-to-call function on their mobile phone to connect with a business, in this case callers won’t even see the phone number. And, we typically don’t save those numbers; we’re used to searching Google to find contact information, even for companies we’ve contacted previously. While there may be a slight risk of using the dynamic phone number, we think it’s more important to track your marketing efforts.

Each tracking number can be assigned to a source (such as Google AdWords, Yahoo Organic, Yelp, Facebook, or another website); the correct tracking number will display when a user reaches your website via one of those sources. Then, when a visitor calls the tracking number, the system links their call with the campaign. If you’re using keyword level tracking, it will send session data back to the server, similar to the data collected in Google Analytics. This gives you the power to see a caller’s activity on your website before, during, and after their call.

ROI

All this information gives your sales and marketing teams access to important data. Your sales team can instantly react to a lead with inside information. Your marketing team can see which channel drove the lead and it’s value to your business.

There are many different call tracking options out there. If you’re thinking of getting a subscription to a call tracking service, be sure to check the key features available. For example, if you need it to integrate with a CRM, make sure the software has that ability. If you need to link it to your AdWords, again, check. Make sure you pick the right system for you.

Have you used a call tracking service before? If so, which one? Or, have you developed your own way of working out where your leads come from?