A call tracking software gives marketers a clearer picture of which marketing channels and campaigns are driving calls.
So, for example, if your business spent $9,000 on marketing during March (or any given time period), you might see that...
In short, you can track how many inbound calls are coming from any marketing channel and campaign, whether it’s online or offline.
With that being said, capturing phone call leads and tying them back to their marketing source isn’t unique — any call tracking solution you’re considering should be able to do this.
So what differentiates one call tracking software from another? What should you look for when picking the best possible call tracking software in 2022?
There are two main things:
These are areas that we placed a heavy emphasis on when building WhatConverts, and we feel that they’re some of our biggest differentiating factors.
In this post, we’ll start off by diving into WhatConverts call and lead tracking in detail, specifically, what makes it different and what our customers like most about it. Then, we’ll list other competing solutions, so you can do the research for yourself and make an informed decision.
Note: Interested in learning more about WhatConverts? Visit our site and sign up for a free 14 day trial or request a live demo with our team.
Table of Contents
Like we said above, almost every major company (including our own) offers very similar, commoditized features specifically around tracking calls. For example:
In addition, most call tracking solutions offer standard report templates that show which marketing channels, campaigns, keywords, and landing pages drove the most calls. Here’s how those reports look in WhatConverts:
These features should be part of your bare minimum requirements for choosing a call tracking software.
You can do all of the above with WhatConverts (and much more), but regardless of what solution you choose, make sure it can do everything mentioned above.
Now the question is, what differentiates our product? Why do customers choose to go with WhatConverts over other competitors in the space?
There are three main reasons, and we’ll discuss each in detail below.
Behind each phone lead is a rich array of data points that describes where they came from, what they saw on your site, when they made a call, and more. For example:
Those data points can all be captured, but most call tracking software either don’t include those details — they just report on the numbers of leads. Or, they do so only in a few rigid formats, and customizing it to see the details that matter to your business is hard or impossible.
Being able to understand, group, and measure your lead generation as a function of any of the metrics listed above is essential to measuring the effectiveness of different marketing channels.
WhatConverts is built around:
Here’s an example table of leads in WhatConverts:
You can see different data points associated with each lead, like source, medium, name, email, whether they are quotable or not (our terminology for qualified) as columns that you can sort and filter through to get insights on what marketing works best.
For example, say you wanted to only see leads that came from Google and were quotable, or maybe a dental office wanted to see only leads that came in from a particular PPC campaign and were interested in a dental crown procedure. In WhatConverts, you can filter down to just those leads in a table similar to the one above in just a few clicks.
From what many customers who have switched to WhatConverts have told us, most call tracking solutions do not make it this easy to analyze the details behind leads or sort and filter leads by criteria like where they came from, what they’re interested in, whether they closed, or what landing page they made a call from.
In other software, this has to be done manually (which is tedious), typically by exporting all this info to Excel and running complicated formulas to get the same information.
This was one of the key problems we set out to solve when we built WhatConverts, so with us, you can do all of this inside our tool in just a few clicks, no exporting or manual analysis needed.
The ability to do more than count calls, and instead let marketers and business owners easily and quickly understand where the calls are coming from and what is working best to drive them is a fundamental difference between WhatConverts and most other call tracking solutions discussed below.
The fact that WhatConverts lets you sort and filter through the details behind each lead as discussed above is great, but we paired that with a really powerful reporting platform so that you can easily see, list, and graph this data, sliced and diced however you want in a matter of minutes — and all without leaving WhatConverts.
You can then save these reports and even schedule them to be sent to your marketing team (or your clients) who can view the results without having to log in.
In short, you don’t need external reporting, and you can build any report you want inside our platform.
For example, say you want to see everyone who clicked on a Google ad on a particular keyword, made it to a specific landing page, and then converted (called). You can build that custom report, save it, and schedule it to send weekly, monthly, or at any frequency.
Typically, with other call tracking providers, or from other analytics software like AgencyAnalytics, you have to integrate information from multiple sources. You need information from Google Ads, then you need information from your call tracking software, and then you have to integrate them.
This is time consuming and cumbersome since the data is in different places. Plus, it can take a day or more just to assemble reports in this way.
Instead, with WhatConverts, this just takes a few clicks.
And these reports can be customized however you want — to answer any question you or your client asks. For example:
Any of these reports, or any other question you want to answer about leads and calls can be created in WhatConverts in a matter of minutes, without exporting data, without working in your own spreadsheets, without hooking up to Google Ads or Facebook APIs — all within WhatConverts itself.
Again, with a lot of other call tracking platforms, if you want to generate custom reports to answer questions like those above, you can’t do it within the platform itself.
Instead, you often have to connect the call tracking software to a 3rd party analytics solution like AgencyAnalytics, Google Analytics or even Google Data Studio.
Many do have the basic reports built in — for example, a landing page report. And often, you can filter down to say leads by landing page just from Google organic. But as soon as you need to add more customization, like sorting the report not just by landing page, but landing page and keyword, or showing landing pages only from a specific advertising campaign — they can’t do it. You’d have to do it manually or connect to another tool, which is extremely arduous and time-consuming.
To illustrate this, here is a simple Landing Pages Report showing leads of different types by landing page for a hypothetical dental office:
You can see different landing pages in the graph at the top with the number of leads they generated, color coded by the type of lead.
Note: In the following section, we discuss how WhatConverts tracks calls but also all other types of leads like web forms or chats.
Now, if you wanted to see not just the top performing landing pages, but those landing pages by acquisition channel (aka source and medium). You can do that in just a few clicks:
Notice how the list of landing page URLs changed in the graph above to landing page and source/medium.
If, then, you decided that you didn’t want Google Ads and Google organic in the same report, and just wanted to see the top performing organic traffic landing pages — you can easily do that in just one more click:
Above you see the source/medium next to the landing page URLs are now all Google Organic.
This is just a small example of what’s possible with WhatConverts reporting.
Our reports are built to be flexible and customizable, instead of just a handful of fixed reports, which is the standard with other tools.
As we mentioned, any of these reports can be saved, named, and scheduled to be sent to your team (or clients). Any question you want to answer about leads and calls can be created inside our platform in a matter of minutes, and you don’t need to add any external reporting tools to the mix.
Most companies start with our call tracking, allowing you to see what marketing makes your phone ring.
But what if only a fraction of your leads (i.e. 40%) are phone calls?
We make it easy to track all of your leads back to your marketing, including:
And it’s all in one central dashboard which you can sort and filter through to get a complete picture of which marketing works best.
For example, you can filter by a specific landing page and by Google/CPC leads only. And then see which of those leads came from calls and which of those leads filled in a form, contacted you through chat, downloaded a piece of content, and so on.
We’ve heard from customers that used other call tracking tools and they mentioned having to spend a lot of time trying to join call tracking data with web form data to get a holistic picture of which channels are working manually.
With WhatConverts, you don’t have to try to do this manually, or tediously, with spreadsheets and hours wasted. You can see that information at any time with just a few clicks.
In our experience, this ease of finding information means marketing teams will check and use that information more often, thus improving decision making.
Second, seeing silo-ed marketing data can lead to incorrect decisions on which channels are actually working, which can harm revenue.
For example, if you saw only call data in one tool and noticed that Facebook Ads weren’t driving calls but Google Ads were, you may be inclined to stop Facebook ad spend and focus only on Google.
But if all lead data (calls, forms, chat, etc.) is presented together in one platform like WhatConverts, you may notice that while Facebook ads are not driving calls, they are driving content downloads and those same leads are calling when they see Google ads later on.
This information would totally change your view of the effectiveness of Facebook Ads. Without it, you may be inclined to turn off Facebook Ads even though it’s actually driving business.
You can visit our site and sign up for a free 14 day trial.
In addition, you can request a 30 minute live demo with our team. We’ll show you how the product works in more detail and answer any questions you may have.
At the time of writing, CallRail has a total of 130 reviews and 4.5/5 stars on Capterra.
They offer features including but not limited to:
CallRail is a great product and we view them as our main competitor. For that reason, we created an article (see here) that discusses the main features that differentiate our product.
At the time of writing, CallTrackingMetrics has a total of 46 reviews and 4.6/5 stars on Capterra.
CallTrackingMetrics is the second product we’re most often compared to, and they offer features including but not limited to:
At the time of writing, Invoca has a total of 17 reviews and 4.8/5 stars on Capterra.
They’re a great fit for enterprise companies, and they offer features including but not limited to:
Update: Invoca acquired DialogTech in 2021
At the time of writing, DialogTech has a total of 13 reviews and 3.5/5 stars on Capterra.
They offer features including but not limited to:
At the time of writing, Marchex has a total of 30 reviews and 4.4/5 stars on Capterra.
They offer features including but not limited to:
At the time of writing, Phonexa has a total of 11 reviews and 4.9/5 stars on Capterra.
They offer features including but not limited to:
Michael Cooney is a co-founder of WhatConverts. Connect with him on Twitter or via email at [email protected].
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