Editor’s note: Mark Sullivan is director of analytics at CallRail, an Atlanta based call tracking service.
Call tracking, or technologies that track inbound phone calls in much the same way that Google Analytics tracks Web site visits, is an old technology undergoing a major renaissance. The rise of the smartphone and the new mobile customer, are making click-to-call far more appealing. This is part of what’s driving the 24 percent year-over-year increase in inbound calls to businesses in 2014. Despite this increase in calls and more money than ever going into mobile 
advertising, many marketers are still missing the boat on call tracking.
For reference, the call tracking technologies available today provide in-depth information in as much detail as a marketer may need – right down to which Google AdWords ads, Google search terms or even Google Maps clicks are generating phone calls. For advertisers that are familiar with the technology, tracking has become an essential tool for the measurement of mobile advertising ROI. Looking at the not-so-distant past tells us why call tracking is finding new life.
What do you get from tracking?
Not so long ago, in a world dominated by the likes of the Yellow Pages, prospective customers would either discover local businesses from a directory, memorize ones they had seen on a billboard advertisement or use a business recommended by a friend. The high success of phone books, specifically the Yellow Pages, had everything to do with having the right information, at the right time in the customer’s buying cycle. After all, when someone is looking for a local transmission repair shop in a large directory, that person is transaction-ready. Getting in front of those customers fetched high dollar from advertisers.
Smartphones are the new way for businesses to get in front of these transaction-ready customers. All of us are using smartphones to view business directories (Google Maps, Yelp, etc.), recommendations from friends (Facebook reviews, Google Plus reviews, etc.) and the modern equivalents of billboards (banner ads, display ads, retargeting ads). With this discovery happening on a smartphone, it’s no wonder that businesses are seeing an increase in incoming phone calls. Click-to-call calls to action (CTAs) remind us that the device we’re holding in our hands is still a phone, capable of connecting us with someone at the business we’re viewing.
This shift from landline to smartphone has fundamentally changed the frequency, nature and origin of over-the-phone customer interactions. For the average business owner, there has been confusion for years around how ad dollars spent correlated with the leads they valued most: inbound phone calls. Companies providing services ranging from transportation to health care to automotive have always converted over the phone but how were customers finding them? Large companies had access to call tracking technology but without an enterprise sized budget, many business owners were left wondering what made the phone ring.
In the same vein, marketers who spend money on mobile ads are challenged to prove the ROI of a particular ad beyond clicks or other proxies for revenue. Clicks are no longer the Holy Grail of conversations that they once were for desktop ads. Many of us in the industry are trying to solve this challenge by providing more insights into which ads are paying off and which are failing to convert. None of the other solutions currently available come close to the affordability, accessibility, and ease-of-use that modern call tracking platforms provide.
The future of call tracking
As more advertisers realize the value of accessing transaction ready customers directly on the device customers are shopping on, the more dollars will go into measuring the effectiveness of those ads. We’re set to see a correlative increase in click-to-call CTAs as well – for the simple reason that call tracking optimized numbers can bring phone calls into the data driven world of today’s marketers. Luckily for most business owners and their marketers, call tracking technologies close the ROI loop without breaking the bank. That’s a good thing for all of us spending money on mobile ads.