The ability to precisely measure which online (and traditional) marketing channels are producing leads, customers & revenue is vital. At Home Services Marketing, we strive to precisely measure your marketing return on investment to ensure that each marketing dollar is spent wisely and we maximize your ROI over each specific marketing channel.
Call Tracking is an important component of our marketing measurement infrastructure. In this guide, I’ll explain what call tracking is & why it’s important, how call tracking works and how we use this data to improve marketing campaigns and increase revenue and profits for our landscaping partners.
Setting The Stage: The Call Inquiry Customer Journey
Below is a typical customer journey for a potential customer requiring a residential landscape construction service.
The Google Search Engine Inquiry:
The potential customer hops online and (over 90% of the time) uses the Google search engine to search for the best and most relevant landscaping company in their neighbourhood for their specific home project. They might use a specific search such as, “best plumber to install heat pump Vancouver” or a more vague search like, “plumbing contractor near me”.
Awareness of Your Specific Company:
Let’s assume your website is well optimized for search engines and you have a kick ass Google Business Profile. If this is the case, they’ll see your website link at the top of the Google organic search results and (hopefully) click through to your website. You might also be using Google Ads to get a leg up on your competition or attract a specific and lucrative audience. forhigher converting search terms. If this is the case, the potential customer may see one of your well placed Google search ads and click through to your website through this channel.
Landing on Your Website:
Once arriving, they browse around your (well optimized with fantastic user experience) website. They then might look into your credability (by diving deeper into your Google Reviews or social media, case studies, partner testimonials) or make sure you have authority and know what you’re talking about (maybe by reading a couple of your service specific blogs or watching a product or service demo video).
Initial Contact:
Once this potential customer is satisfied that you’re the real deal and offer the exact service that they’re looking for, they click over to your contact page, click on one of your phone number CTAs or simply dial your number from their cell phone.
Voila! The client customer journey!
What Happens When You Don’t Use Call Tracking
We’ve just provided a brief overview of the customer journey from initial search on Google, to discovery of your company and brand, through their website user experience and right up to the point of their phone call.
Only 2 Ways to Call:
There are only 2 methods with which this potential customer is going to call you:
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They’ll click on your phone number link (that is, if it’s hyperlinked). This is more likely to happen on mobile – especially if you have a solid mobile version of your website with strong phone number CTAs (call-to-action buttons).
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They’ll just dial the phone number they see on your website into their phone. No clicking needed.
Not Using Any Analytics Whatsoever:
If you’re not using any form of tracking or analytics this is where the trail will go cold. You won’t be able to track where this customer came from.
For instance, if this potential customer turns into a qualified lead (that is, they are interested in a service that you offer and located in your local service area) and convert to a paying client, you won’t be able to evaluate which marketing source, campaign, keywords, messaging led them to you. This is a big problem.
Perhaps you can do a little qualitative digging over the phone or through a survey asking where they heard about you, but they’re more than likely to simply say “the internet” or “online” and give you very little else in the way of context and detail.
Furthermore, you won’t be able to establish return on investment for your marketing channels and campaigns. Sure, you can look back and see which clients purchased a service at which time but how effective was your organic SEO work vs. paid campaigns? What % of clients are coming from your traditional marketing efforts? Are your email marketing campaigns or retargeting efforts producing quality call leads. These questions remain unanswered and you’ll struggle to improve your marketing performance over time.
Using Standard Analytics but Not Call Tracking:
If you’re only using basic analytics (example, you have Google Analytics set up) but not utilizing call tracking you’re still only 10% of the way there.
Most generalist marketing agencies will typically not stress the importance of call tracking. They also likely will not have customized and proven systems and strategies in place to deploy and measure home services company call inquiries.
This is because most generalist agencies work with a wide range of service and non-service based businesses, where phone call inquiries might not be an important lead.
For these agencies that don’t implement call tracking, but DO implement basic analytics (such as Google Analytics) they will miss measuring 2 important things:
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They won’t be able to track any calls that don’t occur through clicking a phone number link. If someone actually clicks on the phone number button or link they CAN track this. However, if someone doesn’t click the link, but simply enters the phone number in their phone, they’ll be totally out of luck. Through our experience with home services companies this is what happens the majority of the time!
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Even if they do track the phone calls that begin with a phone call button click, they have no way of knowing if the click led to an actual completed call, what that call was about, if the call was a quality lead and if that lead resulted in revenue and profit. They are optimizing their marketing efforts to produce phone call button clicks instead of quality phone calls from potential customers that result in sales, revenue and profit.
Why You Should Use Call Tracking For Your Home Services Company
By now we hope it’s pretty obvious why you should use call tracking for your. home services company; to more effectively evaluate which marketing channels and campaigns are producing revenue and profit for your company so you can continually improve your marketing performance and ROI.
In short, a few of the major benefits of call tracking:
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Ability to accurately and efficiently identify the marketing channel, campaign, message, keywords and more that produced the call inquiry and ultimately customer and revenue.
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Improved ROI measurement: Call tracking allows landscaping businesses to track the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns by linking phone calls to specific sources, such as online ads or social media posts. This helps these businesses measure their return on investment for different marketing channels and optimize their marketing efforts.
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Improved lead generation: Call tracking allows you to track the effectiveness of lead generation campaigns by linking phone calls to specific sources, such as web forms or landing pages. This is a major advantage in helping you identify which lead generation strategies are most effective, and optimize these efforts to generate more leads.
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Identify and fix marketing campaigns that are generating fake or spam leads by allowing you to measure the number of actual completed calls vs. incomplete or spam calls.
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Better customer understanding: Call tracking can provide you with valuable insights into customer behavior, such as call duration and call frequency. This can help you understand customers’ needs and preferences better, and help you make more informed decisions about marketing and sales strategies. additionally, listening back to call recordings to evaluate and improve your staff’s performance.
How Does Call Tracking Work?
Call tracking is quite clever. It works by inserting a snippet of code on your website that will change the number that is shown to website visitors to a different and unique number depending on where they came from.
Now when they call this number, even without clicking on it, the call tracking measurement platform will be able to identify the original source of the inquiry and pick up all kinds of data about the caller.
The call is always forwarded to your original business number so to the customer nothing has seemingly changed.
*Configuring call tracking correctly typically involves a little bit of technical knowledge and often web development skillset so ensure you have someone on your team who can do this or outsource a marketing agency!
We’ve created a short 3 minute video that explains call tracking for landscaping companies.
If you’re curious about call tracking specifically, or marketing options for your company in general, you can visit us at Home Services Marketing or contact us at any time if you have a detailed question.
Start Growing Your Home Services Company Now!
Reach out today for a no strings attached consultation with Andy, our trusted CEO and founder, and learn how we help home services companies grow.
Learn how we helped a landscaping company grow to 1 million in revenue per month from online sources alone.
See how we helped a permeable hardscapes company become an online juggernaut.
Or check out how we helped a company reach the coveted 10M a year mark.
We help grow Canadian home services companies of all ages and sizes meet their growth goals. Need some more proof?
Check out our Home Services Marketing Machine, Blogs, or reach out today for a free, no strings attached consultation to see if you qualify for our Canadian Home Services Marketing Program.
Whatever you do, don’t forget to leverage the power of Google My Business when developing your company’s online presence. With it, you can boost organic visibility and local search rankings with relative ease. So make sure to include this powerful tool in your overall digital marketing strategy. Good luck!