Why Call Conversions are Better Than Clicks

by

Erica Hawkins
May 1, 2017

If you’re a digital marketer you understand the importance of tracking all of your clicks to get a full picture behind how your leads become actual customers. You may even tie those clicks back to metrics you can build optimized campaigns on, like “how much traffic did that landing page receive?” or “which keywords drove clicks to our website.”

Understanding how your customers find you and interact with you online is extremely important – but what happens when leads decide to pick up the phone instead of filling out a form? Not tracking your calls can create an attribution gap that causes inaccurate data, ultimately wasting your time and your marketing spend. Here are a few reasons call conversions should be tracked and why when it comes to driving revenue and growing your business, they’re better than clicks.

Higher Conversion Rate

We’ll start with the most important and also most obvious reason you should be tracking your calls – they have a higher conversion rate than clicks. Research from Marketing Sherpa and Hubspot indicates that form fill-out leads only convert to customers about 2% of the time, in contrast to the 25-40% of inbound phone calls to local businesses that turn into customers.

More Context

You can use tools like FullStory to get more context on the features and landing pages your potential clients click on or hover over, but there is no replacement for hearing your clients tell you what they’re looking for first-hand. Call recording is one of the most powerful features you can use with call tracking. It not only allows you to understand why leads are calling but it gives you the ability to hear if leads are qualified, allowing you to update your ads from the amount you spend to even the type of copy you use.

By 2019, mobile search is projected to generate 162 billion calls to businesses. Using click-to-call in your mobile marketing campaigns allows you to take advantage of this surplus of potential customers who want to reach you over the phone. Not only are more calls coming, but those same phone calls convert 10 to 15 times more than web leads, meaning that phone calls are the channel you should be focused on when it comes to hotter leads and generating more customers. If you’re not implementing click-to-call you’re missing out on acquiring and converting leads.

Adding Value to Clicks

The truth is, as long as the internet exists we will never move away from tracking clicks – but lucky for us tracking calls makes it even easier to understand why, when, and how customers interact with our site before converting. Call tracking integrations with Google Ads (formerly AdWords) and Google Analytics make visibility easy. Plus, with call tracking, you can actually see which actions are more than just clicks, but calls.

We’ve seen this value first hand for one of our clients. After noticing the shift towards mobile marketing, digital agency Adster started using CallRail call extension phone numbers in their Google Ads click-to-call campaigns for data accuracy and lead qualification.

“A click is one thing, but an actual call is a separate conversion that you can’t track through Google Ads alone. Not only that, but an actual sale is another thing altogether. Even if an ad drives a click, and ultimately a call, if that lead isn’t handled correctly over the phone it won’t become a sale,” said Forster.

Using CallRail, Adster can listen to calls to understand how leads are handled and track calls back to the landing page or keyword that drove them. They also use CallRail for data accuracy, proving whether or not their Ads campaigns are actually driving calls and not just clicks.

Learn more about how call tracking can help you convert your calls at a higher rate than your clicks with a no obligation demo of CallRail, or go ahead and start your 14 Day Free Trial, no credit card needed.