Video Transcription
[Josh] Welcome everyone, we’re going to go ahead and get started, looks like we have a good bit of participants so far, and people will still have a chance to join. So today, we’re going to be talking about CallRail visitor-level call tracking. The reason that we call it visitor-level tracking is because it really helps you drive into detail, unlike the exact session that resulted in a visit to your website, which then resulted in a call to your business.
We’re trying to provide as much information as we can in regards to the actual website session there. And so the way we do that is with the website pool or visitor-level tracking. Before we get started, I’m going to introduce myself, and Harrell is helping me with the questions today, so as soon as I finish, he will introduce himself as well.
My name is Josh Jones. I started with CallRail in May of 2017. I have a 19-month-old son, I enjoying hiking and spending time outdoors. And I also love travelling to new places and experiencing new things with my wife. – [Harrell] Hello, I’m Harrell, and I’ve been with CallRail since June 2017.
I’m a writer, so I’ve written screenplays, directed and produced some short films, and I enjoy horror movies and traveling to historic sites.
Now you have a little bit of an idea of where we’re coming from. We’ll start about how we’re going to go ahead and address this topic today, we’re going to cover the basic setup and the benefits of using session-level call tracking. It’s not going to be an exact how-to, however, you will have access to that information within the slides that will be sent to you after the webinar.
If you see the webinar and decide that you do want to set up visitor tracking, you’ll have all the information that you need to do that within 24 hours of the webinar completing. As far as troubleshooting, if you have like specific questions regarding your CallRail account or any of the things that we’re going to cover today, if there’s like a specific error that you’re receiving or run into a roadblock, you can definitely let us know about that at support.callrail.com, you can submit a ticket there.
Our support team will be happy to help with any of the set-up process that you have questions regarding. In regards to questions as well, we’re going to have a Q&A session at the end of this webinar. In order to monitor that, we’re going to use the Q&A feature within the webinar.
If you have any questions as we’re going through the slides, you can just submit those via the Q&A option. We are going to ask you to not put them in chat because we won’t be monitoring the chat features, and to also get our attention on the Q&A section. So if you have a question, just put it in the Q&A. And you can put it in the Q&A at any time, and we’ll go over those questions towards the end of the webinar today.
All right, so here’s our agenda, kind of on a high level, we’re going to go from source-level tracking versus visitor-level tracking to get a little bit of information about the differences between the two and how each one helps you. Then we’re going to go into like the actual technicalities of how visitor-level tracking works. Then we’ll also spend some time on some frequently asked questions in case any of those apply to you.
Then also some benefits of visitor-level tracking and questions at the end. So again, we have two types of call tracking that we offer primarily, we have source-level tracking as well as visitor-level. And so choose why we offer two types. We have source-level tracking, which is specifically used for one source. We also call this single-source tracking. So if you have like a billboard or an offline campaign that you’d like to monitor the success of, you can use a single number to track that single source.
That’s a good way to think of it, as a single-source tracker, has one number to one source. So, you can use it for one campaign, you can use it for one ad, you can use it for, you know, an ad extension. Anything like that is going to be good for source-level tracking. Visitor-level tracking is going to be specific to your website. Any of the leads that you get from your website, or that…it doesn’t necessarily have to originate from your website, it can be leads that come from like Facebook to your website or anywhere from a different source to your website would be reported with visitor-level tracking.
Not only on a source level, but you’re also going to be able to get the session data as far as the keywords that they’ve searched and how they ended up on your page. We’re going to a little bit more detail on how all of that is reported, but that’s kind of a high level overview of the two types that we offer and the reason that you might use them both. If you have any questions regarding that, feel free to put them in the Q&A there.
As far as the call details that each of these will provide, here is a little bit of information regarding that. Obviously, they’re both going to provide caller ID details, so like who your actual caller was, and the source, if it’s configured correctly to do so. If you’re using a single-source tracker, if you’ve configured it to show like the exact source that that’s coming from, and where that number is listed, then we’ll be able to display that appropriately.
That’s again like a one number to one source ratio. And then the added benefit of a website pool or a visitor-level tracker is that you’re going to see the landing page, the keywords, the referring URL, and the campaign. And so a little bit about referring URL here, that’s basically like what page they were on before they landed on your website.
If they came from a directory or from like somewhere on Facebook, or Google, it’ll show you that URL, and then also the landing pages of the pages that they actually landed on when they clicked over, and then obviously as well, keywords like the whatever keywords they searched within the Google search engine or whatever search engine they’re using to find your page. Here’s a little bit more information regarding the reports that you can see.
You obviously see calls by day and time, and missed calls for both. But you’ll also see call attribution, custom reports, landing page and keywords, and campaigns. And so landing page and keywords and campaigns are going to be specific to visitor tracking.
In order to see campaigns, you’re going to need to add a parameter to your URL, so UTM_campaign= would be enough to give you that information, but it won’t be pulled dynamically the way that website pool as well. All right, so now on to visitor-level tracking and how it works. So here’s kind of the technicalities of how exactly it works.
Essentially, what will happen is you have a pool of numbers or a list of numbers, and so on that list, you may have four numbers or eight numbers depending on how much traffic your website sees, and we’ll go into a little bit more detail on how you decide that number as well.
With that pool of numbers, we assign those to different visitors as they encounter your page. If you have four visitors on your page at a time, you’ll need at least four numbers for each of those visitors to see a specific number. Then we pair the number that receives a call with the session of the user that had that number at the time. If I see the number 404-555-9765, and then I call that number from your page, that’s going to then be represented within the CallRail platform with my data, like the keywords that I’ve searched and the session information that ended up with me being on your page, and then placing a call to the number.
Here’s a little bit about how that looks in CallRail. This is a what’s known as the timeline for a visitor that placed a call to a website pool number. And you can see that they have called one time all in all, and this is the path to that call for them.
You see the keyword that they searched, they came from Google Paid, and it was a phrase match. You can see all of that information there from the timeline within CallRail. At this point, there are a few questions that people have, and I’d like to go over some of those. The first that we get the most would be, “I have 1,000 keywords that I bid on.Do I really need a number for each keyword?”
The answer to that is no. Really, what we’re looking for is enough numbers to cover as many concurrent visitors that they could have at one time. So what we advise in order to figure that out is that you take your peak hourly traffic for your website, which you can get from Google Analytics, most analytics will be able to provide that information for you. And then you can take 25% of that number, so if you have 100 visitors on your website within 1 hour and that’s your peak hour, and you want a pool of about 25 numbers to be sure that each of those new visitors have a unique number for that section.
The reason it’s important that each visitor has a unique number for their session is because if two visitors have the same number, like, let’s say you have five visitors, but only four numbers, we’re going to pass the fourth number out again, so that means that two people will see the same number and then we don’t know which one of them today that actually placed the call, which can end in misattribution.
That’s why it’s important that you have at least enough numbers to cover as many people as you can have on your page at a time. Here are some of the benefits of visitor-level tracking and why you might be interested in setting it up. The first is it allows you to connect to Google Ads. And so for a lot of marketers, their \challenge is that they need to prove their efforts to their clients and that they’re worth what their clients are spending for them.
That allows you to show your conversions within ads and within an ads account. So all the Google Paid calls that you received within your keyword pool would then be sent over in to ads as conversions, to the conversion action that we create for you. This also allows you to view keyword data in CallRail, and we can go into more information on how to set that piece of this up because it does require a few extra steps.
It also allows you to improve website traffic, if you’re taking the information that you received from the website pool and acting that on ways that can drive paid sessions and things like that. This also allows you to calculate multi-touch cost per lead. And basically, what we’re talking about there with multi-touch cost per lead is that you have a lot of different sources that people can find you, and so we’re trying to help you identify which of those are, you know, giving you the most profit.
How much are you spending on your leads versus how much are you actually being able to return from that? Let’s go into more detail on doing call conversions in Google Ads. Once you integrate your CallRail platform with the Google Ads platform, which you can do under the Settings tab in CallRail, what will happen is we’ll create a phone call conversion action within Google Ads, and that happens automatically.
Basically, what will happen is when you receive a Google Paid call from the website pool, that call will then be sent to Google Ads as a conversion to this conversion action. And so there’s a few things to know. Basically, the primary thing there is that you don’t want to change the name, the conversion action once it’s created. Changing it from anything other than Phone Call will prevent that integration from functioning correctly.
At that point, we wouldn’t be able to represent the data in Google Ads. So once we create it, just leave the name, you can change any of the other columns that you’d like from import to clicks or other or how many conversions are counted. You can edit that as much as you like, just don’t change the name. And so that’s kind of a little bit more information on the ads function there once we’re able to actually establish that connection.
Let’s go into how we actually view keyword data within CallRail. So to set that up, the first thing that we’re going to want to do is add this little parameter to your URLs within ads. And you can do that on the campaign level or the ad account level. We typically recommend doing it on the account level, that way it applies to all of your ads.
But you just need to add keyword= I’ll put all keyword there. What that’s going to do is dynamically insert the keywords that they searched inside the brackets there for where it says keyword. And so that’s where we’re going to look when we go to identifying the keyword that was searched. And so we’ll find that keyword= in the URL, and then whatever is in place after that, we will pop onto your CallRail dashboard so that you can see it there.
As you can see, there’s a link here at the bottom, and that’s going to be clickable for you within the slide deck that gets sent out after the webinar. So if you have like specific questions or you feel like you’re in a rush for writing any of this down, don’t worry too much because we’re going to have all the links for you as well afterwards. So that will all be available to you.
This is what the report looks like, if you wanted to view how many keywords or how many calls resulted from each keyword. So here, you can see the phrases that resulted in calls to your keyword pool, and you can measure the success of those as well. This report actually is the Call Attribution report, and you can change the parameters there.
It doesn’t necessarily have to be viewed by keywords, and you may actually already be using that specific report. However, this is how you can see the success of your keywords that you’re bidding on there. All right, so now we’re going to go into more information regarding calculating multi-touch cost per lead in CallRail.
I talked a little bit about this before, but basically what this is going to do is it’s going to help you prove the ROI. Your clients are spending a certain amount to have you market for them, and so if you’re doing this for your own business, you know that cost. And so you understand that you may be spending more on advertising than you’re getting out of it, and so what we want to help you do is identify what of that spend is actually being returned.
That’s what we’re doing there by proving the return on investment for you, helping you understand exactly how ad spend is driving conversions, which ones are and which ones aren’t. And with that information, you’re going to be able to optimize your ad spend, so you’ll be able to see which keywords are actually worth spending money on, which campaigns and ad groups are successful, and this is also going to help you monitor the success of your landing pages as well, so you can see which landing pages are driving calls and which ones are not.
You can also view all this within a single cohesive report, which is known as the CPL report, and I’m going to give you an example of that here in just a moment. Here’s a little bit more information regarding multi-touch cost per lead. It helps you view the calculated cost for Google Ads, Facebook and Microsoft Advertising ( formerly Bing Ads) specifically.
The reason it’s for those three is because they require visitor-level tracking, and those three integrations. CallRail has native integrations with those three platforms, and so by integrating them, we’re able to see exactly what you’re spending for those when you log into that account within CallRail. And so we take that data as well as the calls that you’re receiving from the actual conversions that you’re getting, and then we’re able to represent that to you in the CPL report, which looks like this.
Here you can see the keyword that is being bid on, about the cost per raw lead. And you can also change the attribution model there. This one is a 50/50 attribution. We also have two other attribution forms that marketers debate on which one is, you know, the best to go with, but you can make that choice for yourself because all three are available to you within the report.
It’s also going to allow you to change the way that this is displayed from keyword to landing page and to other specific things that you might be spending money on to get people to your page. That’s all that we have prepared as far as the visitor tracking session is concerned.
I’d like to go ahead and open it up now for any questions that we have regarding the content that we went over in today’s webinar, regarding visitor tracking or any of that, the CPL, anything that you have regarding those. So the first thing that we have, we have one question for, if this webinar will be available to watch after?
That is something that we’d like to be able to do. It will be a part of the email as far as the slide deck, and if we can include the recording, we’re going to. We believe that we’ll be able to get that done, so it shouldn’t be a problem for us to send the recording as well. But if nothing else, the slides will be available. And just a reminder, to use the Q&A section for any questions that you’d like to ask as well.
We did receive one question regarding like how to connect Google Ads into CallRail. And so, each of those platforms that we mentioned — Microsoft, Facebook, and Google Ads all have native integrations within CallRail. Once you’re logged into the CallRail platform, you can go to the Settings tab on your account, and you can see all the other platforms that we integrate with.
We have a lot of native platforms that integrate with, so all you need to do is just login to your account for that platform, and you’d be able to link the two and see the specific data for your company there. Another question that we received, is the URL…the referring URL the same as the source?
In some cases it will be. So for example, if the referring URL is Facebook, then the source in that case it would just say Facebook. It wouldn’t necessarily be the URL that it’s coming from. But in some cases, you will see where the exact URL is just placed as the source. And that’s, in most cases, because it’s a redirect from the actual like landing pages they landed on from the ad.
Essentially, the referring page should inform the source so that you should match up. I had a question specifically regarding CPL. And so for the CPL report, it’s pulling the data from your Google Ads account, so if you have investments that you’ve made as far as bids and things like that for the keywords that you’d like, that’s going to inform the CPL report as far as like what your actual spend is, and so it’s going to compare that to the call that you received on that spend.
We also received a question regarding specifically where in Google Ads to add the URL, and it’s going to depend a little bit upon your Google Ads account. Primarily, at the end of the day, it used to go at the end of your ad URL. However, where you accomplish that in Google Ads is going to depend on your Google Ads account level.
You can do that at the ads account level, you can do it per campaign, or you can do it per ad, so depending on which of those you have access to. However, one of the documents that will be sent after the webinar is going to include information on where to go to actually retrieve that as well. We also received a good question regarding keywords and organic searches. Our capability there is limited by what Google provides us.
Google actually considers like someone clicking on to an ad as someone giving consent for you to see the keyword that they’ve searched. If you click on a Google organic search, Google does not see that as something that qualifies as consent to see the keyword. So because of that, they will not serve us the keywords from organic search, so we only get paid search keywords from Google in that instance.
Then that goes the same for the other two search engines that we monitor mostly as well, Yahoo and Micrsoft. It looks like we don’t have any other questions. So if you have anything else, just go ahead and you can feel free to put it in there, and we will follow up afterward.
Thank you all so much for joining us today. We’re going to do a lot more of these webinars, and so I hope to see you in the future at those as well. Thanks, everyone.
