CallRail’s top 4 form tracking features & how to use them

Introduction

Thank you again for everyone joining our Part 2 Form Tracking series. If you do have questions, the phone lines are muted. But we definitely want to hear all of the questions that you have, so please submit any and all questions or feedback in the chat box at any time and we’ll do our best to answer all of the questions at the end.

I’m a Product Marketing Manager here at CallRail. And joined again with my friend and colleague, Jason Tatum. He is a Senior Product Manager here. – [Jason] Hello, everybody. Welcome back.

Tatum is the Product Manager on form tracking as well as attribution, but he really spearhead this recent launch. So we’re excited to dive a little deeper today and go into some more details on our Form Tracking product. So agenda today, we’ll do a quick recap of Part 1 webinar. If you missed that…

Again, that was with myself and Tatum a couple of weeks ago shortly after we launched our new form tracking product. So if you missed that, we’ll do a quick recap. We’ll talk about integrating external forms, automation rules and scoring, custom reporting and leads report, as well as how you can view person-level data in one place, and then, like I said, at the end of the call, we’ll have time for a Q and A.

Awesome. So a quick recap, and I highly recommend if you haven’t, after this session, like I said, I highly recommend, I’m biased but, listening to Part 1.

We had a lot of good questions at the end, and we talked through the launch of Form Tracking. Tatum talked a lot about the problem, the attribution problem, that we were currently experiencing and how it led us to look for a solution and bridge ourselves into a full attribution platform.

I’m going to show a couple of slides, these probably look really familiar if you did attend the first session, just really quickly. I won’t spend too much time here. But as we know, path to purchase is not linear. That’s what makes the attribution problem so prominent today. People are jumping around cross channel, cross device, across tons of time period.

The channels will work against each other to get credit for that sale. So again, Facebook will try to claim that they drove the lead, whereas Google may claim they drove the lead, and we are just here to be your single source of truth in a single platform.

You know, which has led to this outbreak of swashbuckling logos which, you know, CallRail is here for the [inaudible].

Exactly. We’re going to get a little more into the product world today. This isn’t going to be a full demo, but we will be showing you some of the in-app experience as well as the product. I highly recommend signing up for the free trial for form tracking if you are an existing CallRail customer, or you can activate that in the app but we’ll talk about activation a little more towards the end.

How does form tracking work?

So how does it work? So what’s really cool, and again, if you are a CallRail customer, you are familiar with the JavaScript snippet, so that is formerly our dynamic number insertion. And that single line of code enables you to track all the calls, texts, and forms. And not just tracking those at a granular level, but really accessing the multi-touch interaction data.

To be clear, we’re still doing dynamic number insertion through this one piece of JavaScript. This isn’t like a new piece of code. It’s just that we used to only if and only if you’re using keywords or multiple numbers swapped based on each person on your website.

It’s still very valuable. But along with that, now we’re tracking attribution data regardless of whether there’s a keyword or not. So if you have forms on your site and you want us tracking that data, we will. But it’s important to note that even though this is a JavaScript piece of code and we are collecting data, this is first party data that we’re collecting.

We’re collecting the data of people who have come to you and have interacted with your site and have made a contact, right? Like, they called you and they’ve submit a form. So it’s giving that data based on first party data, not third party.

Exactly. It’s a really good way to put it. Really, really quickly, I did get one comment that someone wasn’t able to hear, however I’m still seeing a bunch of attendees in the room and I’ve only gotten one person who said that. So if you can’t hear me, please feel free to post in the chat or the questions.

So if you want to see the web session or you want to see the refer, we collect and curate all of that for you and so, that you’re able to see it all in one centralized place. So you’re able to see exactly the steps that were taken despite the amount of time or the type of interaction.

Yeah. And just for some of the fun things about this page that I love is that all of the data that you see here is completely and automatically populated via CallRail. So by virtue of our JavaScript snippet, this timeline is building on its own and the things that you have to do are have forms on your site, have number swapping on your site, and you are off to the races.

Session level tracking

We’re talking about the session level, the session details like the source and the keywords, the landing page, etc., that drove that interaction, and then the interactions that happened behind it and and beyond it. And the only thing that you really need to do here is that if for some reason the name that we captured, is like, needs to be edited, you have the power to do that.

You can also, from this place, initiate a phone call or a text message right from within app. But that top level person details gives you a snapshot of the interactions that you’ve had, the tracking number, or the source that came through, the contents of the form, all of that, in one sweet place. And it’s not just view, there’s other actions you can take off of this, but this gives you that like, “Hey, here’s Todd with 1D, and this is the life he’s living.”

Exactly. And I don’t want to beat a dead horse as far as like the value of forms in general goes. I know that if you are utilizing forms, you’re very familiar that if you’re doing any digital marketing, you need to have a lead capture form, even if you’re just marketing towards an existing customer base.

Maybe you’re in the auto industry, or health care, or legal, maybe you’re an agency, it’s very likely that if you have any sort of product or service, that you have an online form to be able to track and capture.

Google Analytics integration

Yeah, and I think that one thing that I want to emphasize about the value of this is that many of you are almost certainly using Google Analytics to track a lot of these events, right? Like, you have goals set up for forms and for phone calls, and you might be using CallRail to send those phone call events to Google Analytics, and that’s awesome and you should do that.

Google Analytics has great data however, that data is going to be anonymized, right? You’re not going to see it. You’re not going to see, like, the actual person and you’re not going to be able to take action on that person to be able to respond and have a quality, value-driven conversation from Google Analytics. This place brings all of these things together with the identity resolution at play and it also combines, my favorite part, it combines the interaction types into one timeline, right?

It’s centered around that person, not around the interaction itself. So you’re not trying to, like, mix it, like mash up these customer journeys and resolutions of identity from your forms goals bucket and your calls goals bucket to all in one place.

If you’re utilizing your API, good on you because we can send that data via API. We can send a lot of this data through Zapier and other tools too. And along with that, the last point I’ll make is that because we integrate really well with both calls and forms the tools like Google Analytics, is you can still keep those numbers tight by sending that data directly to Google Analytics.

By the way, this isn’t on the agenda. But our Google Analytics app integration actually, we can fire that event of a form submission directly to Google Analytics without having to rely on the URL, right? So, you don’t have to have a thank you page to trigger that event. It could just happen automatically from CallRail.

If you want to have a little bit of a cleaner experience, you can do that directly using our forms, Google Analytics integration. Isn’t that great, Anna?

– It’s amazing. And that’s a great point to make, Tatum, because, like you said, last time and in Session 1, we’re not trying to compete with Google or Facebook or Microsoft Ads. We’re partners with them, as you said last time, and we’re not suggesting you replace those tools. They are to be used in conjunction with, but it’s just eliminating you having to Frankenstein a bunch of data.

I know that I spend, as a marketer, a lot of time looking between Google Analytics and Marketo trying to understand how different forms are matching up to clicks or impressions or whatever it may be. All right, so as we get into the actual form tracking, so again, we obviously do call tracking.

Now, we have our new form tracking product. It’s enabling us to provide this full marketing attribution, and that’s done through your existing forms that you use today, or utilizing CallRail’s custom form builder. So we touched on this last time, but we’ll take a peek at what that looks like in a moment.

But essentially, it’s the same. It’s the same process no matter what. It’s a form going to a qualification process, to reporting, and then that’s what really fuels the marketing attribution engine.

Yeah. And I want to take just a note about this. This flowchart is pretty simplified, which is great. But one of the things, just kind of going back to the identity resolution, is and something that you go to CallRail and know there is… We actually have a feature with our form alerts where, let’s say, you work, you’re in auto sales, right, and somebody fills out a form on your website asking about, you know, a Subaru Forester, you can actually set it up to where…even if you’re out and about, like you’re out at lunch, or you’re, you know, running an errand or whatever but you don’t want to miss that sale, or even better, you’re an agency setting this up for an auto dealership, you can actually set it up to where in one system in CallRail, you can get this flow to the attribution of what drove that form fill and at the same time, you can make it to where, for every form that comes in, an agent can get a text message that you just received a form and have the ability from their phone to take action on that form from wherever they are.

I really think it’s important as much as we talked about attribution, and I’m an Attribution Product Manager so obviously I care a lot about it. But it’s not just about the attribution, it’s also the other side to the boots on the ground and closing those deals to be able to give the tools to create quality conversations. So I think it’s really about, in this flowchart, we kind of zero in on the reporting aspects and that’s super, super important, but it’s also about how quickly can you follow up with customers and with the best quality of follow up.

Then as far as the form integrations go, so our Series 3, Part 3 will be primarily promoting our different integrations, and talking through the capabilities, and what all you can do with that but from a form perspective. Like we said, you could integrate with an existing tool.

The ones that we work best with are WordPress forms, you can integrate with Marketo or Salesforce. Again, these are these form companies. And then, we’ll go into general integrations in the next session.

Let me just talk about clearly what we’re talking about with this slide and what what this means. This means that with one piece of code, that JavaScript code, or with, like, a plugin with like who will use WordPress, so with just for that being on your site, on the pages that your forms are on, that we’re going to automatically capture the contents of the form submissions from your Marketo form or from your Gravity Form automatically with full session data.

You don’t have to do anything else. You can also do some work around excluding certain types of fields automatically, etc., all those things are good. I got a question, “Will you eventually work with Umbraco?” I do not know that one but I’m going to look into it. We may actually work with it now.

This isn’t an exhausted list. A close, nearly a homonym of that would be Unbounce, and we do work with Unbounce though it requires a slight bit of customization but it does work. So we have a lot of these that we work with and we’re pulling that data automatically. And then some of them that, you know, there might be a slight adjustment that you need to make, you know, either one, right?

– And then, like I said, you can also start from scratch with custom forms, so I won’t take up a ton of time here. Most likely, a lot of you guys are already tracking forms, so you already have a provider. We are not aiming at replacing your form builder. We are not a form builder tool, even though we have that feature and functionality.

We provide the touchpoint attribution data.

I will say that, just as a plug though, that I totally believe that. But one thing that’s always nice is that you can reduce your stack, reduce the amount of tools that you’re using to deploy quality campaigns, then, you know, that’s usually when, I know it is for me in technology, and so, if you want to be able to, you know, if you’re not married to your current form provider, then you can use ours and it’s going to be pretty seamless.

If there’s certain features that we’re lacking, we’re definitely investing in this heavily. So, let us know what you’re missing to be able to be your form provider.

Yeah, really nice. Nice addition. So yeah, a couple of reasons why you would want to use our form builder, consolidating tech stack is definitely one, you’re also going to get cleaner data by using our form builder. Existing form builders are going to track by the form URL, but you’ll be able to report and track by the form name.

Yeah, and I wouldn’t even, I’d even say we’re pretty good on the, what we call, the external forms, so like, your forms from third parties. We’re pretty good at getting clean data there. But we are, you know, when it’s our own system, it’s going to be perfect 100% of the time, works every time. It is always a really good thing.

– Yeah, that’s right. So really quickly to go through this, there’s nothing super surprising, you can utilize a template. So your general lead generation, appointment scheduler, address form, or you can start from scratch. You can easily edit fields, add in any fields you want, so completely customized.

You can utilize a CAPTCHA. I know that’s really important for security purposes and making sure you’re not getting spam. You can easily edit fields. And then, I’m going to go back to Template just to show you an example of one with a template. So let’s say, you’re wanting to start with just, like, a generic lead generation form.

This is just a very generic preview, but you can also edit the styles. So, you can edit the fonts, the font size, the colors, and then you can even pull in CSS styling if you want.

– Yeah, and there’s also a Developer View. So if you want to, if you have that kind of technology, those types of resources, then you can go bananas and and make it as customized as you want. I would expect that we’re probably going to spend some time enhancing that, like, Edit Styles, so we’re probably going to get more robust there.

So if you’re like, “Oh, man, I really want to be able to change the position of those, you know, those fields or if I want to, you know, change the background or all those types of things,” that’s definitely something that we’ll probably come out with soon.

– Yeah, exactly. So that’s only going to be improving. And then, sharing is super easy. So you can embed it on your site, you can share it by URL, maybe you want to just do that, and then email or a text, have someone fill out a form really quick, or you can utilize it on WordPress. All right, awesome. So shifting gears here just slightly.

This is pretty much what I just walked you all through. So building, editing, styling, sharing, all super easy to do within one platform. But then, let’s get into the analyzing. That was tough.

So, analysis is super important. You need to understand what forms and calls are being driven by your marketing campaigns and how you can generate the most ROI with the campaigns that you are performing. So you can easily take action based on the content of a form submission. So what I mean by this is you can automate scoring, tagging, applying a value, but what that means in, you know, real day-to-day terms is that you can analyze certain calls or forms based on certain answers said.

So, maybe you had a question like “Do you provide marketing services to your clients?” If they say yes, maybe you qualify them or tag them as a marketing agency or whatever it may be.

Or maybe someone is interest…maybe you work in the auto industry and someone’s interested in test driving a car and they say they want to do it this week, if you want to identify when someone says this week versus two years from now, you can automatically tag that as a hot lead or someone that should be followed up with this week however, you choose to do it based on your business case.

Basically, think of it as any sort of rule or flow or algorithm that you have in place today or want to put in place to be able to categorize and score. You can do that with Automation Rules.

– The way that I would put it is this is an automatic way based on the contents of the form or the contents of the phone call to be able to automatically categorize your funnel, right, so that you might get 1,000 form submissions and 1,000 phone calls. But, what really matters, what’s most actionable, is who called about the Forester, who called about the Subaru Forester, or submitted a form about the Forester that I’m really trying to move off the lot, right?

So you can do that by applying a tag automatically based on the call, right? Like, you’re not doing it, you set this up, you forget about it, and then when you come into our dashboard, you can immediately have it show up in your call log to show that. And this is on the call log and, you know, do the same on the form log.

So you could just filter to just Tags that say a High Value Customer, or Forester, or whatever it is and that would just be there ready for you to take action on immediately.

– Here’s a better example here. So these are from the Form Submissions, and like Tatum said, you can do it for calls or forms and then eventually you’ll be able to access a lot of this in the same place.

– Yeah. So I was thinking… I knew you’re going to say that. The sort of the golden goose is to put all of these, like, let’s say a high data tables into one place, right? So let’s put all of our calls, let’s put all our texts, let’s put all of our forms into one place because it’s really about the, you know, these all being in one place.

That’s definitely something that’s on our roadmap. It is not super technically easy to do because it’s just a lot of data, but it is what I call the Holy Grail and I think it’s on our horizon. So, stay tuned for that.

– Awesome. All righty then, switching back to our presentation. So again, being able to qualify a form or a call based on certain answers or criteria, using tags to categorize, and then what’s awesome is that being able to view that conversation alongside the attribution data.

So I was showing you the timeline view, but we’ll pop into the conversation-based information in just a second.

– And I would just go back to say another thing about the auto qualifying is that you can also say, like, set up in the automation rules settings, say, if you get a form that says, you know, “Demo,” you can automatically file that into being a qualified lead. Then, if you file that as automatically qualified lead, then we’re automatically generating attribution touchpoints based on that action automatically.

Nothing manual that you have to do. You can do it straight out of the gate. And then, we can automatically calculate things like, you know, multi-touch attribution, cost per lead, etc., all without you having to do a lot of work, which is cool.

– Yeah, exactly. And this is in our demo account, so definitely dummy data here. But this is just giving you an example of what that would look like. So again, I was over here in the timeline view where I’m able to see all of the form submission data.

– Good chat. That’s good to know.

– And then, form contents are here. But, let’s say, I want to go into this inbound recorded call, I can do that as well. Again, this is not like a real call so it would actually have, like, your transcription and touchpoints that you can dive in through, but if you have call scribe on. So, it’s a really good way to utilize the conversation level information in one spot.

So to go into the attribution reporting, popping back over here. So we talked about, in the first part of this series, about the leads report. Interesting name, I know it’s going to eventually maybe be called something else. TBD.

– Well, it is what… It’s named what it is, right? It’s a report of your leads. And so, when we talk about this golden goose of having all of your calls, forms, texts, eventually chats all in one log, definitely something we are looking to do. But what this report actually is going to do, and when I say coming soon, it’s like, we’re knocking at the door here, we’re in the last bits of validation testing, and we’re ready to get this out the door.

What this is is a one-stop view of all of your leads no matter how they came to you. It doesn’t matter if as a phone call, doesn’t matter as a form, doesn’t matter as a text, doesn’t matter as a chat, all in one place. And then, the real beauty of this report is that it’s giving you full attribution data on that person and be able to tell you, “Okay, great.So, I can tell you that Lois here, her first touch was somebody made an outbound call.”

So that’s if you have an outbound effort, we’re still going to give you that first touch of that effort because that’s something that you’re spending money on. I’m going to go down to Bruce Wayne here. Bruce Wayne’s first touch was through a Google ad. We know the campaign to that. If you’re integrating with Google ads, we’re pulling in that data automatically, right? We’re not even… Yeah, look at that.

You’re getting the campaign level, getting all this session details. We actually can know down to the keyword. But then, we find out that the, you know, the lead creation when they became that first contact was through a phone call or through a form fill and to see what the interaction was that drove that, what was the marketing effort that drove the qualifying, what was the last thing before there came a customer, which is something that’s coming soon.

Sooner if you’re using HubSpot as a CRM. But you know, to the question, will I be able to attribute the form fill and the calls of the same customer? Yes, you will. This is interaction agnostic. So, it doesn’t matter if it came through a call or form fill, what matters is that your marketing efforts, your Google Ad, converted Bruce Wayne into being a qualified customer and you’ll be able to report on that instantly.

So just to give you a little bit of the techie breakdown on this. Every time somebody becomes known to our system through that one piece of code, when they make a first-party interaction, like there’s a phone call or there’s a form fill or a text message, we begin associating the session data that we have with them to build out that timeline that we showed you earlier.

And as we’re building out that timeline, we’re giving or assigning touchpoints based on the actions we had. So, we know that as Bruce came through the timeline, came through his customer journey the first time, we know that there was a marketing effort that drove him to that first touch or for that lead creation moment, and were able to build that out.

It doesn’t matter if it was a form or a phone call. It does matter in the sense that you want to know how to…because there’s a cost to all of those things as well, right? But it really helps you drive the marketing effort and give that attribution there. And you will be able to see what… I don’t think this screenshot shows it. But I believe if you were to… When we have this report live, you’ll be able to hover over that Lead Creation Milestone and it’s…

Yeah, that little button. I think it’s going to tell you. It will actually show you, “Oh, this was a form fill. This was a phone call,” which is pretty cool.

– And to your point, you’ve said that a lot. Like, we don’t care if it came from a call or a form which…

– We do care but…

– No, no, no, I agree. I see what you’re saying. But to your, well, conversely, you could view all calls or all forms.

– Right. You’re getting all that data in CallRail, but this is telling that particular story of this is your list of leads. It’s tell you about the marketing efforts that got you to that. And this is one cool thing. If you look at each of these columns, you’re seeing the data, the first touch, and then you’re seeing times to the next milestone.

So you’re going to see how quickly that Bruce Wayne moved from his first touch before he even did a interaction with us to being qualified five-day leads. So you get some of that insight right off the bat.

– Yeah, I love that. It’s like at a high level. You don’t have to dig in. And again, you’re not having to compare with Google ads, and Analytics, and all of that. Awesome. So the leads report will be a custom report.

– It will probably come out initially as a custom report, but very quickly will be an out-of-the-box report. So you’ll get to see, like, the out-of-the-box view, or if you have custom reports in your plan, you’ll be able to, like, drill in on the things that matter to you and say that, you know, go bananas.

– That’s awesome. Well, again, you can see our interface. If you’re not familiar with our tool, it’s super clean, really easy and intuitive to navigate. I’ll log over or jump over to my reports. Creating a custom report is super simple. I won’t go through it, but if you did, you would do this.

Forms attribution

I have an example one I’d like to show you, which is our custom report showing cost per lead by campaign. So last year, Tatum and I also worked on this project as well. We rolled out the multi-touch cost per lead report. And this essentially, again, this is dummy data, there’s not a ton of information here, but this pulls in your spend on Google Ads, Microsoft Ads (formerly Bing ads), as as well as Facebook.

So you’re able to see how much it costs to acquire those leads.

– So just by integrating with those ad networks and turning on the right buttons and such, and by being integrated with them, we’re automatically going to be correlating that timeline, that customer journey, and then also pulling in the spin automatically, so that we can tell you instantly the cost per lead of your marketing efforts and to be able to do that through different lenses.

So, this is on first touch, though we have you know, a 50/50, a W-shaped model, etc. So you can get, you can compare the attribution, the cost per lead based on different lenses to get a good idea of your flow.

– And we got the question about the cost for the form tracking essential product, and that is $65 per month, and the cost per lead report is included. So, the cost per lead report used to be an additional per company cost. But the form tracking product is $65.

So, if you bundle that with calls, you get a discount. I believe it comes out to be depending on your calls plan somewhere about $100 a month. So, compared to more, like, enterprise attribution companies, those are going to be thousands and thousands of dollars a year, maybe even per month.

– Just to add a little bit more to that, so it’s a $65 to the base all-in for the features and you get to create as many custom forms through CallRail as you like, and you’re going to get included 1,000 forms per month as part of that. And for additional usage, so because you’re using CallRail and you’re killing it, and you’re getting tons more form fills because you’re optimizing your marketing spend, and you start getting, you know, over 1,000, then you’re looking at, I think, about 2 cents per form over, which is pretty low.

So it’s pretty exciting.

– I like that. I’ve done that math, that’s a good way to think of it. Awesome. All right. So, quick preview for Part 3, again, we’re going to be discussing integrations and taking a deeper dive. I do want to show you if you all are interested in signing up for form tracking. If you have not used CallRail before, you can just go to our brand spanking new, I recommend this regardless, but you can go to our Form Submission Tracking page.

Check this out. Start a free trial. If you’re already a customer, we’re working on making this a little easier to activate but you can currently activate forms to try for free from your Tracking or Billing page.

I think it’s important to note that, as a Product Manager, I really care about you trying this and I want to talk to you directly. So if you’re using this or you want to use it, and you want to volunteer to just tell me what you think about it, I invite you to do that.

I want to know what you’re getting out of it, what you’re not getting out of it, will it give a more value, all those things. So, my contact’s going to be in the slides, but it’s tatum, tatum@callrail.com. So, please, seriously, the offer’s on the table. It would help us serve you better, which is fun. The other thing about the pricing, just to note, is that you can try the premium version for free for two weeks, but you can also, if you don’t need 1,000 submissions a month or if you don’t need more advanced usage, you still get a lot of great attribution features with our free form product.

So yeah, we actually have a free product in our app now that you can do even if you don’t need calls. Like, you can do that. It’s there, and we want you to get value out of that too.

– Yeah, exactly. All right, so we have a couple of questions here, so I’ll go ahead and answer them. Let’s see. A lot of people just confirming they could hear me, I appreciate it. Some of these, we already answered.

– It can be a standalone plan.

– Yeah, exactly. So someone asked, “Do you have to have a light or a central plan or can it be standalone plan?” So, these are two completely separate products. So it can absolutely be standalone, so you can do just forms, or you can start with forms and lead into calls or maybe you know and love us for our call tracking, and then you navigate into forms.

Totally your call.

– So just to be a little bit clearer on that. Two different products, two different plans, but it’s the same login, right? So, you don’t… Like, if you decided to use call tracking or if you’re using call tracking, you want to use forms, it’s not like a different instance. It’s just adding it and we will magically transform your user interface into one that accommodates multiple products.

So don’t worry about having to manage like a different billing or anything like that. It’s all on one.

– And if you’re using Account Center, or if you’re not, you should definitely look into that. If you’re managing multiple accounts, this makes it super easy and it’s turned on at the account level. Easy to activate. Awesome. Well, I really appreciate you all. We’ve answered most of the questions, but we’ll follow up with any other answers.

Like I said, we’ll go ahead and be sending this and please keep an eye out for an invitation to Part 3. We’ll also be promoting it on social. And then, again, head on over to callrail.com/form-tracking, if you want to see what a new product is all about.

– And for the person that asked about and Umbraco, thanks for the additional context. We’re going to get on validating that immediately and I will probably reach out to you directly and let you know. So thanks so much for that.

– Awesome. Thanks, guys. Have a good one. Bye.