Marketing agencies: Improve your performance with call tracking

Looking for ways to improve your performance as a marketing agency? In the complex web of touchpoints that forms the customer journey, one critical aspect often flies under the radar—the impact of phone calls. Marketing agencies are missing out on the data that will give them an edge, simply by not drawing insights from inbound phone calls.

For both agencies and clients, tracking phone calls can be a tricky task. Telephone leads often carry a higher value and indicate an urgent need – and they play a significant role in the buying process. This underlines the importance of call tracking software as a cost-effective solution to improving your agency’s performance.

Improve your performance with insight from phone calls

Insights from phone calls are especially crucial for businesses where decisions are influenced by factors like price and product complexity, such as buying a car, finding a care home for a loved one, making a healthcare appointment at a clinic, booking a trip, or shopping around for legal services or financial products.

Let’s take a look at some of the key ways call insights can improve how your clients’ campaigns perform.

1. Take meaningful action quickly and adapt to consumer behaviour

Being able to spot changes and trends quickly, and tweak your campaign activity to take advantage of any shifts in consumer behaviour is key to improving performance. If you always have to wait until the next day to check Google Analytics or Ads, or your next reporting period, the chances are you’ve already missed out on the opportunity to make meaningful changes.

“To truly understand your audience, you need to be able to see all their touchpoints with you, both online and offline,” says Faye Thomassen, Head of Marketing at Mediahawk. “You need to know where they have come from, whether that’s organic search, social media, or an offline channel and then where they went onto. This helps you understand your customers’ concerns, as well as any barriers they face throughout the customer journey. Knowing all of this will help you optimise your campaigns to the channels that are driving the most growth towards your objectives.”

Real-time access to data and insights is key. It’s all too easy to get overwhelmed with data and bogged down in the detail though.

Using a feature like Parameter Connect allows you to hone in on specific activities.

It seamlessly combines different datasets. This gives you the benefits of a vast amount of data in one easy-to-use report, so you know precisely where to make the changes that will make a real difference in campaign performance.

2. Unmask assisting clicks to reveal the channels that influence conversions

Most marketing analytics tools don’t shed enough light on the middle part of the customer journey.

Google Analytics 4 (GA4) provides a number of attribution models (data-driven, paid and organic last click, and Google paid channels last click). However none of these give you the full picture. By default GA4 only tracks online conversions, so if your clients receive phone calls these aren’t reflected in the data at all.

By integrating call data into GA4, your analytics become much more accurate as well as taking into account every single aspect of the customer journey. What’s more, you’ll have access to really detailed marketing attribution reports that reveal what channels influence conversions – giving you the extra layer of insight you need to make the changes that are going to drive significant improvements to your marketing campaigns.

“Part of our agency growth over the last four years, and why we partner with Mediahawk is the fact that we can actually prove beyond doubt the success of our campaigns. We can put monetary value against phone calls, and ultimately, we can optimise our campaigns a lot quicker, smarter, more efficiently.”
– Raife Wieland, Director and Founder, Promote Online

3. Track every call-to-action for more insight on the customer journey

Your clients rely on customers phoning in, filling out forms, downloading content, clicking on website email links, and engaging with live chats. These are all really important aspects of the customer journey. Making small tweaks to each step will have a significant impact on the overall performance of your strategy.

Michael Morrell, Mediahawk’s CEO says, “Customer journeys are getting longer with more complicated routes to conversion, and Think With Google research shows that it could take as many as 500 touchpoints to convert a prospect interested in flights for example. This makes the job of marketing agencies far more difficult, even more so when relying solely on web analytics software. Although web analytics can tell you many things, including entry and exit page on your site, traffic sources including which campaigns are driving sessions (not users), they can’t tell you the full picture for all your marketing channels. This is where investing in additional software like call tracking can be a valuable add on.”

By tracking all calls-to-action (CTAs) on your clients website, you’ll see every single interaction that every user has on your clients website. Imagine what you could do with insight that shows when and why certain CTAs are triggered during a typical buying journey compared to a high value buying journey? And which channels are delivering those high value customers? 

What’s more, going back to the first point, all this data is available in real time, allowing you to make powerful changes quickly.

“Web analytics can tell you many things, including entry and exit page on your site, traffic sources including which campaigns are driving sessions (not users), but they can’t tell you the full picture for all your marketing channels.” Michael Morrell, CEO, Mediahawk

Summary

For a closer look at how call tracking can help you improve your campaigns, download your copy of our eBook: Call tracking and search marketing: The combination you didn’t think you needed.

Inside, you’ll discover exactly how you can harness the power of call tracking to better understand performance, break down reporting silos, and ultimately, deliver the kind of results that enable long-term agency growth.