Lead tracking is a cornerstone of any effective marketing strategy. Knowing how many potential customers your marketing efforts are bringing to your website, and where they’re coming from, is crucial to designing a strategy focused not only on lead generation, but also on arriving at the strongest ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) possible. Typical lead tracking involves counting forms submissions, email sign ups, demo downloads – even E-Commerce sales. But one area where even the most strategic clients often lose track of leads is when they come via a phone call.

Now, every business is different. And depending upon your business’s goals and product offerings, phone calls may represent a small drop in the bucket of the total interactions coming from customers or a virtual tsunami of potential revenue. Every lead generation strategy must examine the importance of this lead type to their clients, and plan for it accordingly. Whether the amount of monthly phone calls your business receives are a few or a ton, counting them, knowing their sources, and qualifying them is essential.

Here’s an example: say you own a plumbing company. You offer both pipe-fitting work for new constructions and renovations, but you also rely heavily on emergency plumbing jobs to build your brand and bring in added income. Your website features a form on the contact us page for customers to submit information on upcoming projects, and you list your phone number so they can get in touch with you by phone as well. Your marketing agency is running ads to bring new customers in, and when a form is submitted, they’re tracking which marketing channels bring those people to your site.

But if they’re not also tracking the phone calls that are coming from your site, then you’re potentially losing all insight on the effectiveness of the lead generation marketing that’s built to drive half of your company’s business – those emergency plumbing jobs. This is because 9 out of 10 of those people looking to contact you in an emergency won’t be filling out a form and waiting for a response – they’ll be calling to talk to someone now so they can solve their problem as soon as possible. Without proper phone call tracking, you aren’t counting how many calls are coming in and from what sources, and without this knowledge, your plumbing company has a big hole in the bathtub of their lead attribution.

There are a number of ways to track the phone calls a website generates, but the easiest and most effective is to utilize a third-party service dedicated to solving this problem. Often when a new client comes on that isn’t properly tracking phone calls, we’ll recommend one of these services straight away to immediately understand how much data we’re losing on these leads. With the help of these services, we can start counting how many phone calls your website is generating over time, which marketing channels are responsible for bringing the people who called to your website in the first place, and how valuable these calls are from a sales funnel perspective.

There are a variety of options available when using one of these services, but often they will collect specific data on the phone call when one is made. They’ll track the date and time of the phone call, the phone number and name of the caller, whether the call was answered by your staff or not, how long the call lasted, and which marketing source was responsible for the click that led the caller to your website. Depending on your needs, these services can also record these phone calls and provide written transcripts for your marketing and sales teams to review and assign qualification metrics. They also integrate well with other marketing platforms, allowing you to see some of this data in web analytics, advertising and CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tools.

But tracking the call is just the first step. The true power of phone call lead tracking comes in analyzing the data that comes with each call and understanding how big a part of your overall marketing strategy calls represent. And this understanding can make all the difference between knowing if your company’s marketing dollars are being used effectively, or if money is just going down the drain.