For many companies, regardless of the revenue of online sales, offline calls comprise a solid core of the overall conversion ratio. The generally-agreed total of calls made offline which were generated through an online search is around 43%*. When these calls are highly valuable in terms of revenue, there is an immediate problem in the task of interpreting the success of the marketing campaign.

This often happens in areas such as the travel industry: it is to be expected that, for larger sales amounts which require more commitment from the customer, the customer will often want to talk to a person over the phone to answer queries or to provide specific information. When you think of the massive amount of conversions finalized in this way, it has to be understood that, without the ability to analyze the ad source for these sales, there is no way to assess the performance of the overall campaign, nor determine a working ROI.

Call tracking software bridges this gap over the chasm of the offline marketing picture. Given the sheer number of offline sales in these industries, this allows for responsive and informed control over the spending of one’s ad budget, and a deeper knowledge of the performance of newspaper, radio and television advertising. With the emergence of telephone conversion tracking, this huge grey area of the marketing picture is filled in with incredible detail.

The data retrieved using call analytics is conducive to business pragmatism, and serves to empower action made to the upkeep of a marketing campaign. The marketing budget of any business is something which requires justification to use – with a smaller company, it is especially precious; with an established business it is no less indispensable because there is more of it. Being able to streamline and conserve even 10% would be a massive improvement of marketing efficiency, and as individual ad campaign numbers can be identified and confidently supplemented or reduced, the level of specificity to which you think you need to rise in your conservation of budget is entirely in your hands.

Imagine, for example, that your new television advert has just cost you a more than sizeable chunk of your ad budget. Sales increase, and so, happily, you consider to continue the ad, or even to expand on it, moving to a more popular channel at a more popular showing time. In reality, the decision to pump more budget into this campaign is not as practical or sure-footed as it seems; it could even be that the ad is failing miserably in achieving justifiable ROI, and the sales peak is being generated by discrete from the TV ad.

With a call tracking solution, every call contributing to this sales peak can be sourced and accounted for. A system of identifiable telephone numbers matches the ad that generated the call, and so, if for some reason the television ad was in fact failing to achieve its potential, the call tracking software would present the real cause for the sales increase. Without this information to hand, the ‘sure-fire’ decision to the continued subsidy of the TV campaign would have been a costly mistake.

As we have seen, the advent of phone call analytics turns a previously unnavigable area of marketing awareness and orientation. High revenue-achieving calls are made every day, and the only thing to decide in an industry where they are profuse is this: can I afford not to be using call tracking?

(*Source: A Nielsen/NetRatings and Webvisible survey: 2006, ComScore Google Study: March 2006)