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...

• 46 calls came from Google Ads (along with which keywords resulted in those phone calls)
• 39 calls came from Facebook Ads
• 30 calls came from billboards 
• 25 calls came from flyers
• And so on.

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:

1. Tools to reveal insights and report on them. Gathering lead data is great, but you need tools to manage and report these leads to gain insights.
2. Seeing all leads in one place complete picture of which channels are driving leads and thus make more accurate marketing decisions. Seeing calls only, as opposed to seeing all leads, including forms and chat can distort your view of which channels are effective.

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

1. WhatConverts
2. CallRail
3. CallTrackingMetrics
4. Invoca
5. DialogTech
6. Marchex
7. Phonexa

1. WhatConverts

Like we said above, almost every major company (including our own) offers very similar, commoditized features specifically around tracking calls. For example:

• Call Recording: Record, monitor, and download incoming calls.
• Call Transcription: Get the details you need from your calls without having to sit through and listen to the whole recording.
• Keyword Level Call Tracking: Know exactly which PPC keywords are driving calls.
• Dynamic Number Insertion (DNI): Allows you to automatically swap a telephone number(s) on your website, so that you can track the marketing source. (You don’t need to buy a unique tracking number and put it on the landing page of each campaign — with DNI, you can do so automatically).  
• Call Greeting: When someone calls in, you can create an automated greeting to be played (i.e. “This call may be recorded and monitored for quality purposes”).
• Call Whisper: Right before you get connected with a caller, you’ll get an automated message that tells you how the lead was generated (i.e. “Incoming call from Google Ads”).
• Call Flows: Ensures the call is properly directed to the right place by giving callers a menu of options. (i.e. “Dial 1 for Sales, Dial 2 for Support”).
• Instant Phone Number Setup & Tracking: As soon as you buy a call tracking number, it's available immediately to use. You don't have to put in an order and wait until somebody gets back to you.

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:

Calls by Source/Medium (see more details)

Calls by Campaign & Keyword (see more details)

Calls by Landing Page (see more details)

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.

Differentiator #1 — Instant, Powerful Lead Analysis. We make it easy to filter and sort through the details behind each lead to know which marketing channels are driving the most calls.

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:

• Where did they come from?
  • Lead Type: Either a call, form, chat, or eCommerce download (as we get to it later, we don’t just track calls).
  • Marketing Source (i.e. Google)
  • Medium (i.e. CPC)
  • Campaign: Which marketing campaign brought them in?
  • Keyword: Which keyword brought them in?
  • Landing Page: Which landing page did they convert on (make a call from)?
• How valuable are they?
  • Quotable: Is this a qualified lead? (based on the phone call transcript and/or an integration with your CRM).
  • Sales Value: How much revenue has this lead brought to your company?
• Who are they?
  • Contact Name
  • Contact Email
  • Phone Number
• And more
  • There are over 70 different data points you can choose to fill in at WhatConverts.

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:

1. Always showing you these lead details in any report you are looking at.
2. Letting you easily sort or filter by any lead detail like source (i.e. Google, Facebook), landing page, or even what product or service the lead is interested in. 

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.

Differentiator #2 — Quickly Create Reports without Adding Any External Tools to the Mix

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:

• Which landing pages are generating the most calls/leads from Google organic?
• Which Google ads are generating the most calls?
• Which pages on our site are producing the most calls from paid vs. organic?
• And so on.

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.

Differentiator #3 — We don’t just track calls. We also track forms, chat, and eCommerce transactions.

(So you can get a complete picture of which channels are driving leads and thus make more accurate marketing decisions).

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:

• Forms
• Chats
• eCommerce transactions
• Downloads
• You name it — if there's any element on your page that you're looking to track, we have you covered.

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.

Why is This Complete Picture (Calls + Other Lead Sources) Important?

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.

Interested in Learning More About WhatConverts?

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.

2. CallRail

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:

• Call Tracking
• Form Tracking
• Conversation Intelligence
• Lead Center

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.

3. CallTrackingMetrics

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:

• Call Tracking
• Call Automation: If you have different departments that answer calls from different campaigns, you have the ability to auto route calls. (WhatConverts offers this in our Call Flow feature).
• Analytics and Reporting: CallTrackingMetrics has an extensive list of standardized reports, but from what we’ve heard from customers, it is not as flexible or powerful as the WhatConverts reporting engine/platform.

4. Invoca

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:

• Call Tracking & Analytics
• Signal AI Conversation Data
• Cloud Security Infrastructure

5. DialogTech

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:

• AI-Driven Conversation Analytics
• Call Routing
• Integrations
• Accurate Call Attribution Technology 
• Enterprise-Class Security and Compliance

6. Marchex

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:

• AI-Powered Call Analytics
• Pay Per Call Leads Marketplace
• Local Lead Tracking
• Intelligent Mobile Messaging 

7. Phonexa

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:

• Call Analytics & Tracking
• Lead Generation & Distribution
• Email Marketing 
• Integrated Accounting