The single biggest problem today with Call Tracking is awareness and adoption. Call Tracking is easy, cheap, and effective, but not all online marketers have caught on yet.

You don’t have to take my word for it.

At a recent “think with Google” presentation, Avinash Kaushik said, “When people come to your website using different strategies, you can show them a different phone number to actually track if people are taking the call to action that you desire . . . This is really, really cheap to do and if you’re not doing this for places on the internet where you spend money acquiring traffic, it might be a minor crime against humanity.”

While I wouldn’t go as far as saying it’s a minor crime against humanity, I would say that as an online marketer you’re not doing your job without it. You can see the full video here. (Call tracking is mentioned briefly beginning at 3:14)

Difficulty for small to medium sized businesses understanding how it could be beneficial.

Call tracking has been around for a while, but it hasn’t been made available to direct marketers, media managers, and third party publishers in a way that’s easy for them to use. Here are some of the things they want to be able to do with call tracking but haven’t been able to take advantage of until recently:

• Instantly activate numbers and assign them to campaigns or different product/service offerings
• Have their tracking numbers easily included in their creative (banners, TV commercials, radio spots, print, etc.)
• Set up and manage the call flow without IT or call center involvement
• Make tracking numbers available to third party publishers
• Measure quality and adjust pricing based on call traffic to each number
• Real time access to reporting and to the controls that allow the media manager to adjust the campaign to better manage their ROI

On the contrary, Call Tracking predates web analytics.

For example, my grandparents’ business used to list themselves multiple times in yellow page style directories under different names and numbers. Then they would manually track which ads generated phone calls. That was back before businesses used the web, let alone web analytics.

The difference today, of course, is that web-based technology enables marketers to activate phone numbers instantly, view real-time reports online, route calls to those numbers based on schedule, percentage, geography, and more.

It has been a little slower because of the fact telephony is a bit more cumbersome than web analytics.

I think we’re just scratching the service of marketers being able to take advantage of call-based analytics to improve their overall marketing and sales efforts. There are as many similarities with calls as there are with tracking and analyzing clicks. Much as you can understand profiles of site visitors based on where they clicked from, if they’ve visited your site before, etc, you can also do with calls. And in fact, the data you can gather on a call can be used to determine which agent to route the call to and what products and services might be a good fit for the caller.

Call Tracking numbers are really just a means to an end; the most interesting implementations with Call Tracking deal with how you qualify and route calls. Here are two examples:

1. We see customers that use call tracking technology to customize their automated greeting to say “Thanks for finding us on [insert ad or website] and calling about our [insert product].” In addition, they ask a series of prequalifying questions automatically before routing the call, and whisper to the sales rep answering the phone what the prospect is calling about.
2. Another example is using call tracking to reduce calls to a support hotline. For example, by placing a unique call tracking number on each web page of a support website, a help desk can track which pages are leading to phone calls and then add answers to those questions on the appropriate web page.

Overall, Call Tracking is about providing marketers with data, sales with a “heads up” about the reason for the call, and customers with an awesome caller experience. Companies doing all three of those most effectively implementing call tracking.

Mobile campaign conversion tracking (Twitter/Iphone Apps).

Having phone numbers in advertisements improves consumer engagement and experience, not just in helping to deliver calls, but it also improves click-through rates online. It’s not that sexy, but it works. Google reported increases in CTRs between 5-30% when phone numbers were included in mobile advertisements. And speaking of mobile, everyone is trying to figure out how to really break into mobile marketing and take advantage of this medium for delivering ad content. What we are seeing is that as intelligent as our phones have become, it is still difficult to complete shopping and check-out processes on the small screen.

The most intuitive use of your phone is quite simply making phone calls. Seeing a phone number placed in an ad, giving the consumer the ability to click-to-call and be connected to the merchant is one of the simplest and most effective means of driving conversions through mobile advertising.

Google Analytics recently opened an App Gallery featuring Phone Call Tracking vendors, the major online marketing blogs have articles mentioning call tracking, and now we even have your blog dedicated solely to the topic.

Overall the coverage is fair, but as leading Call Tracking provider we’d of course like to see more.

There was a general trend towards trying to eliminate phone calls in business process (both at an order and support level). I think people are realizing phone interaction is an important part of business and should be tracked versus marginalized.

I think it’s starting to get more exposure, especially as mobile becomes a much larger piece of the marketing budgets. Analyst firms like BIA/Kelsey have been covering this space especially as it relates to things like mobile and local search.

I’d expect that every major web analytics vendor, pay-per-click management platform, CRM provider, and marketing automation solution will integrate call tracking, and probably other phone related technology, into their platforms. Telco is complicated, so rather than building a solution themselves many software providers will partner with existing call tracking vendors, using APIs to integrate Call Tracking with their existing platform. We’re already starting to see signs of it happening, but they aren’t all there yet.

Call tracking will be a subset of overall marketing tracking, giving people the ability to visualize the effectiveness of their efforts.  Call tracking won’t stand alone, but will be married to other data sources for a complete conversion picture.

Just like tracking links have been used online to gauge the performance of media placements, phone numbers will be an essential component in every media campaign that has the propensity to close over the phone. More and more offline media placements will shift from CPM and branding based media buys to performance based media buying and call tracking will be critical to this transition.