By Sydney Bailey, NPI, Inc.’s Marketing Director

As small businesses grow, marketing often becomes a more complex endeavor with leads flowing in from many different campaigns and platforms. To find out whether a marketing campaign is cost effective, it’s crucial to track the cost for each lead and each conversion—but how is this tracking accomplished?

For digital marketing, tracking a lead is fairly straightforward. Thanks to cookies and analytics, businesses can know which marketing campaign a lead interacted with to land on their website. But other lead generation avenues aren’t so simple. Many customers still prefer to call service-based businesses to gather more information before making their final decision. Learning how to convert a lead over the phone is an art in itself, but it can be difficult to quantify a lead’s analytics from a phone call.

For entrepreneurs that receive a lot of their business through inbound phone calls, capturing valuable information about which marketing campaigns are pulling their weight—and which ones aren’t—can be tough, but it’s essential when it comes to optimizing an advertising budget. Today, let’s discuss the best solution to this issue: call tracking.

What is Call Tracking, and How Does It Work?
Call tracking helps determine which marketing campaigns bring in the most leads and contribute to sales. By assigning unique phone numbers to each campaign (Google Ads, Facebook Ads, etc.), businesses can track and identify callers associated with specific campaigns. Call tracking software even utilizes “automatic phone number replacement” to match the campaign’s unique number on your website, reducing confusion. While most digital ads are monitored for efficiency (pay-per-click), call tracking goes further by tracking conversions and contacts from any marketing effort.Many software packages offer features like call recording, caller information collection, and cost-per-lead statistics, letting you assess each campaign’s effectiveness.

One common concern with call tracking is the use of different phone numbers in advertising and its impact on search ranking. Businesses want consistent contact information for optimal SEO performance. Does call tracking impact SEO when used this way?

Does Call Tracking Impact SEO or Cause Client Confusion?
Boosting a business website in search results can be tough (which is why some businesses resort to unethical tactics for quick improvement). Building up a business’ online discoverability the right way takes time and plenty of hard work, so it’s understandable that business owners might be a bit overprotective when it comes to making changes to their website. Rest assured, call tracking is not known to negatively impact SEO.

According to the industry experts in Google Business and SEO strategy at Sterling Sky, Google’s bots don’t see dynamic phone numbers. While a call tracking software will replace the business phone number that website visitors see, Google will still see the business’ official phone number in the website’s code, allowing the site to retain the consistency crucial to good SEO. As with any digital marketing strategy, there are problems that can crop up if things aren’t done correctly, but a negative impact to SEO shouldn’t be a concern for businesses looking to give call tracking a try.

Client confusion, on the other hand, might be a more valid concern, though minor. In situations where customers encounter multiple business phone numbers and record them for later use, there is some potential that this competing information could make them look elsewhere. Fortunately, as smart phones become more prevalent, people are less likely to record or recall business phone numbers from memory. For most marketers, the benefits of call tracking software vastly outweigh the potential drawbacks.

If you’re thinking about giving call tracking a try but would like to know more about the pros and cons, email the marketing team! Did you know that every NPI franchise gets unlimited access to our full marketing team for custom materials, messaging, and informed marketing advice based on your unique situation and national trends? Learn more about the benefits of opening an NPI franchise today!