6 Call Tracking Platforms for SMBs

Of all the Key Performance Indicators that small business owners monitor while tracking the success of local advertising campaigns, none is more important than the number of incoming telephone calls. According to a 2015 survey by BrightLocal, a local search marketing agency, nearly half (48%) of local business owners rank phone calls as the most important KPI, ahead of indicators like search ranking, web traffic, and online reviews.

Incoming calls give businesses the opportunity to engage and impress potential customers in a one-on-one setting, and that personal connection is something local business owners are passionate about. As SMBs explore new digital advertising opportunities, they’re becoming even more reliant on call tracking platforms to determine what’s working and what’s not. Rather than diminishing in importance as new technologies gain a foothold in the SMB community, phone tracking is playing an even more central role in the local marketer’s playbook.

Here are six examples of call tracking platforms that businesses are using right now.

1. DialogTech: Call attribution and conversion for businesses.
DialogTech offers call attribution and conversions services to help data-driven marketers optimize their performance. DialogTech says it works with any phone system, device or call center. Businesses can link phone calls to specific ads, keyword searches, websites, social media, mobile, and offline campaigns. They can also capture “session-based data” for each call, such as geographic locations and which specific website pages callers visited before dialing the phone. The ability to integrate call data with Google Analytics, Universal Analytics, and Google AdWords allows businesses to include call conversion data in their digital campaign reports.

2. Telmetrics: Track which ads are making the phone ring.
Using Telmetrics, advertisers are able to get visibility into the performance of their campaigns and use their lead generation data to optimize ad spending. Telmetrics tracks consumer response to unique local phone numbers, which businesses can then use to determine which of their ads, media channels, lead sources, or keywords are driving the greatest number of qualified leads. In addition to tracking the sheer volume of inbound calls across each number, Telmetrics also offers a “Call Block” feature to monitor numbers and reduce nuisance calls.

3. Convirza: Optimize calls just like clicks.
Convirza considers itself a call marketing optimization platform, combining traditional call tracking with conversation analytics and marketing automation. The company’s call tracking reports measure conversion rates, leads, and call data filtered by campaign, ad, and keyword. Using voice recognition technology, the platform “listens” for words that indicate if a campaign has good calls or bad calls. This information can then be used to weed out channels that produce a high volume of leads that don’t convert. Convirza integrates with multiple digital advertising platforms and generates lead scores for each campaign.

4. Freespee: Turn phone interactions into data.
By converting telephone interactions into data, Freespee is able to improve the usefulness of third-party apps for PPC, social, CRM, and marketing automation. Businesses install Freespee’s tracking script on their websites, and unique local phone numbers are dynamically generated during each website session based on the visitor’s geographic location. Freespee Apps also collects identifiers from third-party ad networks and automatically posts back conversion events, including connected phone calls. The resulting information should be useful when allocating budgets for marketing, sales, and customer support.

5. Marchex: Link inbound calls to specific ads, campaigns, or channels.
As a mobile advertising analytics company that links online behavior to real-world actions, Marchex offers an analytics platform for advertising driven phone calls. Marchex informs clients which calls are resulting from which ads, campaigns, channels, keywords, or impressions. Marchex’s “conversational analytics technology” automatically maps, classifies, and scores every phone call. Businesses can provision phone numbers in real-time, and block incoming calls from telemarketers. They can also connect Marchex to the platforms they use for search, analytics, CRM, and marketing automation.

6. CallFire: Get a holistic view of advertising performance.
Small and mid-size businesses can purchase local, toll free, and international phone numbers from CallFire, which they can then use in online and offline advertisements to track the effectiveness of individual campaigns. In addition to providing a straightforward way to track the number of calls generated by each campaign, this method also gives businesses the ability to keep a local presence in multiple cities. Inbound calls that are tracked with CallFire can be recorded for later analysis. Call detail reports are linked to Google Analytics, and custom alerts can be setup to let businesses know when certain triggers are met (like whenever a lead is converted during a phone call).

Know of other call tracking platforms for businesses? Leave a description in the comments.

Stephanie Miles is a senior editor at Street Fight.