Call Tracking Isn't a Burning Pain, And It Should Be.

I spent a couple of days in San Francisco with tech entrepreneurs and marketers. I've become a little obsessed with tracking what marketing works, I was interested to find out how these tech-savvy marketers measure their marketing. How do they track their marketing spend? Do they track phone calls? What lead management systems so they use?

Yes, they track leads and e-commerce sales through analytics software. If they are a SaaS business, they typically use Kissmetrics for online conversions. I wanted to find out how they tracked people that phone in or fill in a form and purchase later.

When I asked about call and form tracking, I got blank stares, a couple "hmm... never thought of it" and "Oh, how does that work?" I was stunned, their responses really did surprise me. These people owned businesses, were marketers and even ran software companies that serve ad agencies. These people can tell you their online conversion rate, their sales per channel for online sales and even their churn rate for recurring customers.

Call tracking was not on their radar, it's not a burning pain they want to solve.

Why Should Call Tracking Be Buring Pain?

A burning pain is something that is so important that if solved creates huge benefits.

As an exercise, I took a look at the data from 5 companies where they were tracking calls and web forms. Here's what I found:

By starting to track phone calls, these companies were seeing on average 80% more leads. This means that if you are currently receiving 100 web form leads a month, and you begin tracking calls you would see an additional 80 leads a month.

If these aren't being tracked, how do you know what marketing channel resulted in the phone call that become a lead and sale?

In a nutshell, if you are not tracking phone call leads, you are severely undervaluing your marketing.