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What is call tracking?

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CallRail

March 3, 2025

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Call tracking helps you understand your customers’ journeys by following their interactions through phone calls. When you use call tracking, you assign unique phone numbers to different marketing campaigns. This allows you to track and analyze the calls that come from these campaigns.

Benefits include:

Identifying Call Sources: You can pinpoint which campaign or keyword brings in the most calls.
Improving Campaigns: Use data insights to make informed decisions and tweak marketing strategies.
Enhancing Customer Experience: Gain insights from call recordings and analytics to better understand customer needs and improve interactions.
Boosting ROI: Allocate your budget more effectively by focusing on high-performing campaigns that generate the most valuable calls.

Call tracking uses software to record details about each call, such as who called, what marketing campaign the call came from, and smart insights from the conversation. This information is crucial for measuring marketing effectiveness.

How It Works:

Assign unique numbers to each campaign.
Analyze data to track which ads or channels generate calls.
Use insights to optimize marketing efforts.

CallRail's platform integrates with the tools you use, making it easier to manage and understand phone call tracking. By understanding what drives phone calls, you can better allocate your resources and boost your marketing results.

This method can transform the way you evaluate the success of your marketing efforts. Implementing phone call tracking can lead to smarter decisions and more effective campaigns. It allows you to see beyond clicks and online interactions, getting a complete picture of customer behavior.

The importance of tracking inbound calls

Businesses take and make calls daily, but without call tracking, businesses gain little more than who’s calling and why. While some businesses still ask the classic question of “How did you hear about us?” to see how the caller discovered their company, the caller isn’t likely to provide you with their first true interaction with the business.

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By using call tracking software, businesses benefit from the ability to tie inbound calls directly to the marketing channels and campaigns that the caller interacted with before dialing your phone number.

Benefits of call tracking include:

Marketing smarter with call attribution

Call attribution gives marketers the data they need for call-related conversions to determine which sources are driving the most calls and the most qualified leads. This information can lead to better optimized and more targeted campaigns for marketers.

The following are call tracking features marketing teams should utilize to optimize their marketing campaigns and improve their spend:

Dynamic Number Insertion: Dynamic number insertion assigns a unique phone number to each online source and then displays that phone number to visitors who arrive at your website via that specific source.
Visitor-level tracking: Visitor-level tracking uses dynamic tracking to give you the full visitor journey as users navigate to, from, and around your website.
Source-level tracking: Source-level tracking uses a single, unique tracking phone number for each marketing campaign you want to measure. This is best used for traditional, offline marketing.
Google Ads call tracking: Google Ads call tracking uses conversion tracking that shows you how many potential customers called your business after seeing or clicking one of your paid ads.
Multi-touch CPL report: Multi-Touch Cost per Lead report gives you a calculated cost per lead for each of your Google Ads, social ads, and more - allowing you to measure which advertising campaigns and keywords are driving the most cost-effective leads.
Call Attribution report: Call attribution provides insight into the marketing sources and interactions that are driving traffic and generating calls.

Improving the customer experience

Call tracking isn’t just about knowing where your inbound calls are coming from; it’s also about knowing how those phone calls are handled. With so much competition and buyers expecting more from businesses, personalizing the customer experience is crucial to winning customers over. And many times, it begins with a phone call. Call tracking and analytics provides valuable insights into the customer experience and customer journey, allowing you to measure, report, and improve on more than marketing performance.

The following are call tracking features customer facing teams should utilize for a better customer experience:

Whisper messaging: Whisper messages are a brief greeting that informs the person answering the phone which marketing campaign prompted a phone call before they’re connected to the caller.
Call recording: Call recording allows businesses to record incoming and outgoing telephone calls for use in training, marketing, and other analyses.
Call monitoring: Call monitoring is the process of listening to live or previously recorded calls in order to audit the performance of call representatives, improve sales or marketing efforts, and score the call for leads.
Custom IVR system: IVR systems allow businesses to route every call to the right person, every time.

Call by Day & Time report: Call by Day & Time reporting provides details on the number of calls received each day, allowing businesses to understand peak call time throughout the week and staff appropriately to reduce missed calls.

How does call tracking work?

Learn the differences between visitor and source tracking in CallRail with this video.

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Dynamic Number Insertion (DNI)

Dynamic Number Insertion, or DNI, automatically swaps out phone numbers on a website based on the visitor’s source. For instance, if a visitor finds you through a search engine, they see a unique number. With DNI, each marketing channel has its unique phone number. This feature ensures accurate call attribution. You can track where calls are coming from easily, helping refine marketing strategies.

Call attribution with source and visitor tracking

With call attribution, you understand where calls originate. This involves tracking the source, like a specific website or ad, and even down to the visitor level. Such precision helps determine which marketing efforts are most effective. You can make data-driven decisions to optimize your budget. Incorporating analytics, you can monitor which campaigns generate the most inbound calls and refine tactics accordingly.

Call recording & transcription

Call recording captures every conversation, providing valuable insights after each call. By transcribing these calls, you convert spoken words into text. This is crucial for analyzing call content and gathering insights into customer preferences. Using transcription, you can identify trends in conversations. This helps improve customer service and train your team based on real interactions.

Keyword-level tracking

Keyword-level tracking allows you to see which specific search terms lead to calls. You track keywords that potential customers use before they call you. This precise tracking helps optimize your advertising strategies, tailoring ads to high-performing keywords. You gain deeper insights into which terms convert prospects into action, enhancing your content to target these keywords better.

Smart conversion insights based on conversations

In business, using conversation data to understand customer behavior can be a key differentiator. Call analytics provide insights into how callers are moving through the sales funnel. Smart insights use data from conversations to predict conversion possibilities. By analyzing the conversation content, you can determine which factors indicate a likely sale, allowing you to focus on high-value leads.

Why call tracking is essential for business growth

Call tracking plays a crucial role in enhancing the effectiveness of your marketing strategies and optimizing customer interactions, ultimately driving business growth. This technology helps track the journey of your leads, measuring the performance of your campaigns, and improving your marketing return on investment.

Measure marketing ROI more accurately

Call tracking lets you identify exactly which marketing campaigns are generating phone calls. This helps you assign a value to each call and calculate the return on investment with precision. Knowing which campaigns lead to direct customer interactions allows you to optimize budgets and allocate resources where they will be most effective. This precision can significantly improve conversion rates by focusing efforts on high-performing strategies.

Reduce wasted ad spend

By tracking calls, you can eliminate wasted spending on underperforming ads. You gain insights into which channels aren't yielding results, allowing you to stop investing in them and redirect resources to more effective campaigns. This approach not only maximizes your marketing performance, but also boosts your lead generation efforts by focusing on strategies that truly resonate with your audience.

Improve customer experience and sales performance

Understanding how customers interact with your business leads to improved customer experiences. Call tracking data reveals touch points in the customer journey, helping you tailor interactions to meet customer needs. Sales teams can analyze call data to identify and fix performance gaps. This enhances both service quality and sales effectiveness, allowing for better lead management and nurturing.

Enhance lead quality analysis

With call tracking, you can assess the quality of leads by analyzing the nature of calls generated from different campaigns. This insight allows you to focus on strategies that attract high-quality leads, thus improving conversion rates. You can adjust your marketing tactics to better meet the preferences and behaviors of potential customers, elevating your overall lead generation processes.

Industries that benefit most from call tracking

Call tracking works for practically any industry, including automotive, marketing agencies, home service professionals, and even those industries that require HIPAA compliance. Large enterprise businesses trying to track sales and marketing data and small businesses looking to improve their local SEO both can benefit from call tracking software. Essentially any business that is running multiple campaigns and looking to see where their traffic and leads originated. Small companies with no website who get their business solely by word of mouth are probably the only category of business that does not need a call tracking platform to learn where their business came from-they can benefit the most from the "How did you hear about us?" method.

Home Services (plumbing, HVAC, roofing, electricians, etc.)

In home services, call tracking helps you understand which marketing channels drive calls. With many customers needing urgent services, knowing what prompts calls is critical. You can allocate budgets effectively to get the best return on investment. For instance, if you run a plumbing business, call tracking identifies whether local ads or online searches are more effective in attracting customers. This ensures that your marketing efforts reach those most likely to need immediate support.

Healthcare and medical practices

For healthcare providers, capturing accurate data from calls helps improve patient intake processes and service quality. Call tracking allows you to identify what time of day patients are most likely to call and the common inquiries they have. This insight helps staff schedule more efficiently and tailors communications to patient needs. Marketing channels play a key role, and with call tracking, you can ensure that advertising dollars are spent on the channels generating the most patient appointments.

Legal services (law firms, personal injury, family law)

In legal services, your clients often seek immediate guidance. Call tracking lets you understand which marketing strategies prompt clients to reach out. By analyzing call data, you can identify which services generate the most calls and refine your marketing to focus on these areas. If you specialize in personal injury, call tracking can highlight whether clients find you through search engines or referrals, allowing precise targeting for your advertising.

Automotive sales and services

In the automotive industry, call tracking is useful for discerning which promotions or ads bring in potential buyers. Whether it’s a special offer on new vehicles or repair services, understanding the source of each call can inform marketing campaigns. Tracking calls helps you see whether social media ads or email campaigns provide more leads, enabling better allocation of resources to those channels bringing in customers actively seeking automotive solutions.

Real estate

For real estate agents, call tracking ensures you are investing in the right advertising channels to connect with potential buyers or tenants. When someone calls about a listing, it’s valuable to know if they saw your ad on a website, social media platform, or through a printed flyer. Such insights allow you to continuously optimize your marketing approach to attract the right clients, increasing your chance of closing deals quicker.

Marketing agencies

Marketing agencies benefit significantly from call tracking by gaining detailed insights into campaign performances. You can track which ads and keywords lead to calls, making it easier to adjust strategies to improve client ROI. It lets you validate the effectiveness of various marketing channels, ensuring that efforts are focused on generating tangible results. By monitoring calls, agencies can refine campaigns, streamline resources, and better justify advertising expenses to clients.

Learn more about the industries that benefit most from call tracking

How call tracking works with Google Ads & PPC

Call tracking with Google Ads helps you monitor which ads bring in phone calls. This ensures you spend your PPC budget effectively. Google Ads offers native call tracking tools that allow you to track calls from ads. You can set up conversion tracking for calls made directly from call-only ads or those with call extensions.

Platforms like CallRail can further enhance call tracking. By integrating with Google Ads, CallRail allows you to see detailed reports on call performance. This integration helps identify which keywords drive valuable phone calls and improve your PPC strategy. Moreover, you can push call data back to Google Ads for deeper insights.

Both methods require setting up conversion goals in your Google Ads account. You can customize settings like the duration a call must be to count it as a conversion. Detailed tracking empowers you to optimize and refine your PPC campaigns for better results.

Unlocking the full potential of Google Ads means making the most of call tracking. Whether you're using Google's tools or a third-party solution, understanding which aspects of your campaigns generate calls is crucial for success.

Advanced call tracking with AI

Now is the time to leverage AI to optimize your campaigns based on quality calls and real conversions.

Conversation Intelligence: Smarter Insights, Better Decisions

CallRail’s Conversation Intelligence automatically transcribes calls, spots key terms, and assigns lead scores—feeding valuable insights into Google Ads and other integrations. No more guessing which campaigns drive real revenue.

AI-Powered Call Transcriptions – Instantly searchable with automation rules to tag, notify, and integrate leads.
Self-Reported Attribution (SRA) – Capture the full customer journey by combining what callers say with Call Tracking data.
Call Summaries & Trends – Save time with AI-generated recaps and weekly insights, helping businesses refine services and sales strategies.

Convert Assist: AI That Drives Conversions

Convert Assist helps sales teams turn conversations into conversions with:

Actionable Follow-Ups – AI-generated next steps keep deals moving.
Sales Coaching – Personalized guidance for better performance.
Attribution Clarity – Link every closed deal back to the marketing sources that brought them to you.

Whether you’re a marketer optimizing lead quality, a sales manager refining coaching, or a small business maximizing every call, CallRail’s AI-driven tools help you close more deals—while giving you the data to double down on what works.

How much does call tracking cost?

The price of call tracking software varies greatly depending on your business needs and use cases. Call tracking plans are usually separated into multiple tiered plans and can start at as little as $30/month or as much as several hundred dollars a month.

Like other SaaS applications, call tracking software is subscription based and is typically billed monthly. It is important to note that while some call tracking providers do include phone numbers and monthly minutes in their initial fee, other providers do not and charge per phone number and per minute from the start. Try call tracking free for 14 days.

Questions to ask when looking into call tracking software providers

Is the solution HIPAA, PCI, SOC, or GDPR compliant?
Does the solution integrate with my martech stack?
Can the call tracking solution offer call recording and transcriptions?
Does the call tracking software offer AI powered call analytics to
Do you offer both toll-free and local phone numbers?
Can I take my phone numbers with me if I discontinue the service?
How responsive is their support team, should I need it?
Does the software enable call monitoring for quality assurance?
Does this call tracking vendor have auto response so I don’t miss any leads that come in by text or go to voicemail?

Call tracking FAQ

1. When did call tracking start?

Call tracking in some form has existed since telephones were first invented and used for business. While it was rudimentary compared to current methods, businesses have been asking, "How did you hear about us?" to first time callers for a century. By asking their customers how they discovered the company, business owners could attribute the client to a specific action or marketing campaign.

Fast forward to today, and many businesses still use the "how did you hear about us?" method to determine what is driving the most calls and new customers. However, depending on a customer’s word and memory as to how they found your phone number could lead to misattribution.

Asking a caller how they got your phone number leads to information about which of a company’s campaigns are performing well, but it could also lead to misattribution. Chances are that the customer probably had more than one touchpoint before converting and making the call. Their answer to how they got your information is typically the last touchpoint they encountered. This is called Last Touch Attribution and gives 100% of the credit for a sale or a conversion to the last touchpoint a customer encountered.

2. How has call tracking evolved?

Early call tracking software allowed marketers to set tracking phone numbers for their marketing campaigns and count how many calls each campaign brought in. Each type of campaign–online and offline–got it’s own tracking number. Newspaper ads had a different number than billboards or radio ads. And PPC ads had different numbers than those from the company’s website. The number the customer called showed which source drove the conversion.

All these sources face the last-touch attribution problem. These days customers are likely going to encounter a business’s sales and marketing efforts multiple times before they actually pick up the phone. A customer might see a Facebook ad, search the business on Google, click a PPC ad, and then see a retargeting ad later in their online experience. How can marketers attribute the weight that all these encounters deserve?

The solution is multi-channel lead attribution. Modern call tracking software uses cookies and dynamic number insertion to track online activity and campaign level call tracking to assign each offline marketing piece its own tracking number. Location based businesses can also set up a main line tracking number to ensure that calls to their main line are tracked. This all-encompassing tracking allows businesses to work toward a better overall picture of their marketing efforts and what’s driving leads. The whole journey would be tracked of the example customer who started with a Facebook ad and ended with retargeting. The marketers would know that more than just one element was part of the reason that user finally converted and made the call–a far cry from the “How did you hear about us?” days.

Check out our 10 year anniversary celebration where our team talks the evolution of call tracking and beyond.

3. What is dynamic number insertion?

Dynamic number insertion (also referred to as DNI) is a call tracking feature that assigns a unique phone number to each online source and then displays that phone number to visitors who arrive at your website via that specific source.

4. What marketing channels should I use call tracking for?

To really get a sense of any campaigns success, call tracking should be used for both online and offline efforts.

Offline efforts

Online efforts

Yellow pages

Google Ads PPC

Direct mail

Microsoft Ads PPC

Print ads

Organic search results

TV & radio commercials

Online directories

Flyers & brochures

Social media pages

Billboards

Web referrals

Choose the right call tracking software

Selecting the right call tracking software is crucial for success. Consider factors such as pricing, ease of use, available features, and support options. CallRail offers different plans that cater to various needs, starting from budget-friendly options to more advanced packages.

Evaluate the necessity for reporting features and integrations with your current systems, like CRMs or marketing tools. This ensures a seamless user experience and efficient data management. Also, make sure the software supports dynamic number insertion and other essential features needed for your campaigns. Reliable customer support is a plus, ensuring you have help when needed.

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