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How We Set Up a Data Warehouse and Built a Business Intelligence Strategy for Marketing Insights

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Business intelligence is a comprehensive analytics solution for all of your data that helps your team better understand the levers that impact the customer journey.

Most smart companies want to work off of reliable data to make decisions for their business – and we here at CallSource are no different. But, for CallSource to work off of better data, insights, and measurable decisions, we had to build a complete information system from the ground up. Having a business intelligence strategy enables our marketing team to be connected to the activities that drive performance.

Accountability in marketing is often an ironic statement, as it is one of the hardest departments to prove dollar-for-dollar attribution for. Yet, at the end of the day, if you want your marketing department to be a profit center, you need to be equipped to answer some tough attribution related questions.

Question: Why bother with business intelligence?

Setting up a data warehouse (a soft CDP) involved a lot of work in a territory that I personally was unfamiliar with. Nobody said, “Go get us a data warehouse and BI solution,” because we are a two decades old company and we’ve got reports that everyone is used to seeing. Still, I felt that our reports could be more robust; the current ones didn’t tell enough of the context.

Numbers without the extra context do not explain the ‘why.’ Sure, you want to know what happened – that’s great, and there are plenty of anecdotal reasons for why something happened. But can anything as big as monthly or yearly results be explained in a few sentences? No, sorry. That’s like saying (spoilers) Frodo got the ring and then he destroyed the ring, and that is the story of Lord of the Rings. How many people would pay to see that version of the movie?

Data decision making flows along a maturity curve as businesses start to demand answers to more complex questions. CallSource, like any business, was on the maturity curve and had been using data for decades – but it was missing a lot of that valuable context. The trouble is, you don’t know how valuable that context could be, and until the past few years, the costs were outrageous to find out.

Question: How to create a business intelligence information system?

CallSource is lucky to have a robust analytics department with data science-equipped colleagues that saw the marketing department’s project for what it was – awesome. I chuckle at that, but they also gave us ‘the talk’ where they explained the level of detail and sophistication that might be required.

You’ve basically got three choices:

  • DIY (Heavily relies on having engineers and developers)
  • Multi-specialized tools (Relies on finding the right tools and making sure they play nice)
  • Black-box (A single tool that does it all)

DIY

DIY essentially means setting up your own servers and running your own ingestions and building your reports yourself. You would be gathering the data yourself and organizing it into pretty tables that you can use for reporting. You need expertise in APIs for ingestion, SQL (or similar) for transformations, and someone who knows a thing or two about ETL’s and ELT’s for warm and cold data storage solutions.

Multi-specialized tools

Multi-specialized tools are when you ‘outsource’ those specific jobs to a tool that is designed for it. You are replacing your API developers with ingestion tools, some or all of your SQL and Transformation expertise into GUI interfaces (as needed), and relying on a warehouse managing tool to make sure you have the storage and quick access you require.

Black-box

A black-box tool is one that does everything for you but does require a strong partnership and collaboration to ensure that the data they are reporting on is both the truth and what you needed.

Question: Where to get started with a business intelligence strategy?

Our marketing team leaned heavily on the analytics team to help us plan our steps to getting a business intelligence environment set up. The steps evolved over time as we ran into roadblock after roadblock, but they were still valuable for any company looking to step up its data maturity:

Step 1: Modeling your data for free (not really free)

The first step is writing down all of the important metrics (KPIs) that you need so you can understand what systems you need to pull data from. You DO NOT want to pull everything from everything. In many cases, you will feel like you don’t know what you don’t know until you pull data, but you will still need an idea of what you are looking for. Ask yourself, “What do we use this tool for?” and then write it down. There is a lot of data you and your boss can look at, but it will have no value – we call them ‘vanity metrics.’ A great exercise for after you’ve got your exhausted list is to ask yourself, “If I had to pick 10 of these, which are the most important 10?”

Next, how do you need to see that data? This is the fun part – you’ve got your KPI’s, and now you need to “Jeopardy” those metrics. Basically, you need to turn all of your metrics into questions that you need answers for. An example is starting with the KPI = Phone Calls, and then asking yourself, “What do you need to know about phone calls?” To which, you might respond, “How many phone calls are my team handling every day?” That is a great question! With a question like that you can know exactly what kind of chart you need and how you need to visualize that data. See the example parsed below:

How many phone calls are my team handling every day?
(Red) ‘How Many’ – this tells you that they are looking for a volume (like a sum).
(Blue) ‘Phone Calls’ – this tells you what metric they need the volume of (a metric).
(Orange) ‘My Team’ – this tells you that this data will be scoped for their team (a dimension).
(Green) ‘Handling’ – this tells you more about the metric, it needs to be handled calls.
(Underlined) ‘every day’ – this tells you the time frame (many charts have a time basis).

You can get all of this and model it for free using Google Data Studio. That is where we started for months as we built our dashboards, reports, and more. You can export your data and either upload it to Google Data Studio or you can put it into Google Sheets and import from there. The learning curve on Google Data Studio is moderate – you should definitely watch the plethora of videos and guides on how to get started.

Step 2: Proving your data is worth getting a BI strategy for.

You’ve got to measure the performance of your business over time. You also need to understand the components that feed into your business and affect your ability to take actionable steps after. A metric is worthless unless you are willing and capable of doing something actionable from it. Otherwise, what is the point of making it important enough for a report? If they help me understand the context so that I can make a better decision…then we are onto something.

Here is just an example of how some of the reports can look in Google Data Studio with some line charts, bar charts, filters, single/data, and pivot tables:

We had our data modeled (months later), and our team was getting used to seeing the reports similar to the example above. Week after week, the KPI’s became more and more refined, and everyone started asking for the report. The team and other leaders wanted to see it. Soon everyone started asking questions they had never asked before… questions that required context. For an analyst, this was the ‘superhero’ moment when you see your call sign beamed into the clouds.

While there was data and everyone was curious to see it, now it came time for the value. We had to prove that there was value in data and in seeing this information for our team. The data had to be at least, if not more, valuable than the cost of the tools and efforts it takes to put this together. Remember, marketing is and wants to be a profit center, not a cost center, so everything has to be profit-justified. So how does having better reporting translate into better decisions and insights that recuperate the costs? That was the tricky part.

The answer is to experiment: you learn from the data and then test a project with a new theory to see if it had an impact. With data, we could now measure our impact and influence better than ever before. A lot of things happened over the course of the year it took for this stage to resolve including:

  • Running tests and then realizing that things we didn’t foresee made those tests worthless
  • Learning of new processes we had to add because of the data we had
  • Running tests and then being misled by the data because we didn’t understand our data that well
  • Not running tests and then realizing we should have

The up and downs are part of the ‘maturing’ of having data you never thought possible and then being able to do things with it. I speak of this as the joy that marketers enjoy when they have clean and clear data about the things we are in charge of.

Step 3: Finding the right tools, DIY, and black-box solution for your business.

This section is going to be short and sweet because there isn’t a one-size-fits-all for every business. Every business has complex needs, and we have shifted our direction dozens of time before arriving at our current solutions. I’m not even sure any solution is the be-all end-all solution because this space is shifting and becoming more specialized. In full transparency, I can say that we love our providers and decided to go with a multi-specialized tool solution because it fits where we are as a business. Those tools include Xplenty, Panoply, and MODE analytics.

Question: We are a call tracking company – why does business intelligence matter enough to write about?

Great question, it’s because our company has obstacles like any other business. We are all trying to sell more, be more efficient, and come up with the latest and greatest solution for our future customers. The marketing department went through a pain-staking but valuable experience in finding a business intelligence solution that fits our organization. There isn’t a whole lot of information out there for the laymen’s (where we started), and so this is a post encouraging you and your company to do it. You can do it!

It’s who we are!

Like our clients who see their phone call data for the first time, we know how important it is to have accurate and insightful data. We also can’t begin to tout our vision that we are all about being recognized as the gold standard for actionable analytics unless that culture exists internally as well as externally. We believe that data can transform a business and can lead to consistent and reliable results.

Curious about this? Find me on LinkedIn or shoot us a message and I will be happy to connect with you.

The Phone is Vital to Your Dental Practice’s Patient Experience

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As an appointment-based business, your dental office relies on the phone for new patients and book appointments with existing patients. The phone is an integral part of your full customer experience scope, and should not be ignored.

It is the experience that is delivered which leads to positive online reviews from patients.

Maximize reviews for your practice by ensuring your front office staff provides exceptional phone skills; giving a great first impression on the phone starts the patient’s experience with your office as a positive one.

Patients are calling your office

The easiest way for patients and potential patients to get a hold of you is via the phone. Therefore, this is the first point of the patient experience.

Patients call through your marketing materials

When new patients discover your dental office, they will need to contact you for any inquiries, including booking the appointment. Usually, this point of communication will be via the phone.

You probably rely on marketing to acquire new patients. Your marketing materials should be targeted for your practice’s ideal types of patients, prompting them to contact you. These marketing materials may include:

  • Direct Mail
  • Radio Advertisement
  • TV Commercial
  • Newspaper Ad
  • Online Ads
  • Etc.

Make sure each of your ads have an easy to find contact method included so that people who are ready for your services can quickly get a hold of you. The most common form of contact is a phone number.

Learn how to effectively use call tracking for your dental practice
– in under 30 minutes a week!

Patients call your office after finding you through local search

Another way that consumers may find you would be by searching online to find a practice near them. When they find your office, either from your SEO efforts, local search, or a great online review presence, they will visit your website or use one of the contact methods found on a review website or provided by Google. It is important to make sure you have a working phone number for all of these places that your business has a presence online.

Discover how using call tracking phone numbers
can help your dental office.

Patients call from a referral

Even patients that are referred to you by someone will most likely ask their referrer for your phone number as the point of contact.

No matter how a patient finds your office, it is a high chance that they will call your office as the preferred contact method.

Why a good phone experience is necessary for a positive reputation

When patients call into your office from your ads, finding you organically, or through a referral, you want to be sure that your front office staff has the skills to give a great first impression by providing a superior phone experience to potential new patients.

Your phone handlers are the first point of contact that a new patient has with your office – don’t ruin the first impression and lose a potential patient with a poor experience over the phone.

Get our free call handler checklist for the qualities
of a successful inbound call.

Improve front office staff’s phone skills

To receive great online reviews, you must be sure that your employees are delivering a consistent and positive phone experience to existing and potential patients calling your office.

Are you ready to stay accountable and employee scorecards and coaching your office? Reach us today at 888.788.0123 to learn more, or we can have someone contact you.

Improve your call handlers appointment setting techniques.

Get Employee Report Cards and Call Coaching

I want to talk to learn more about improving
my call handlers’ phone skills

13 Notable Inbound Phone Call Automotive Stats for Dealers

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Even in 2019, the phone is not dead.

While smartphones have become smarter and smarter, they are still being used to make actual phone calls – and consumers are calling auto dealerships as a part of the buying process.

In the brand new Automotive Inbound Call Data Report, CallSource analyzed over 106 million phone calls to auto dealers over a 4 year span. The report illustrates how vital inbound phone calls are to the automotive industry, and delivers key takeaways for dealers to keep in mind when prioritizing phone calls.

Take a look below for 13 of the most important stats from this study, or view the whole report in its entirety here.

The phone is paramount to auto dealers

    1. Over half (54%) of all inbound calls to automotive dealerships are revenue-winning opportunities.
    2. One in four leads calling a dealership are for sales – 75% of prospects calling in are for Fixed Ops.

Make all calls to the Sales department count

    1. Only about half (51%) of your sales calls in 2018 were viable leads.
    2. 80% of inbound sales opportunities are being missed.
    3. Less than a quarter of all sales opportunities (20%) are actual confirmed appointments.

Fixed Ops generate the majority of inbound call leads

    1. About ¾ of all inbound prospect calls to dealerships are for Fixed Ops.
    2. An average of 40% of calls to Fixed Ops have resulted in an appointment since 2015.
    3. 60% of Fixed Ops calls are missed opportunities – no appointment set.
    4. Appointment conversion rates to Fixed Ops have increased from 35% in 2015 to 52% in 2018.
    5. Almost 90% of parts calls don’t result in an appointment.

Service calls and appointments are increasing year-over-year

  1. Over half (58%) of calls to the Service department in 2018 resulted in an appointment set.
  2. Dealers are able to convert more calls to the Service department into appointments than they can in Sales and Parts combined.
  3. Service appointments have been increasing since 2015, but 40% of prospective service appointments are still booking with the competition.

Improve your inbound phone performance

Numbers don’t lie – the phone is vital to automotive dealers. It is imperative for dealerships to track phone calls and implement changes for performance increases.

Check out the full automotive report here to view the above stats and for advice to help your dealership improve.

Digital Marketing & Web Analytics: Where to Advertise?

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When research shows that roughly nine-in-ten Americans use the internet1, a business that doesn’t exist on any digital format today almost doesn’t exist to consumers. More consumers than ever start their research online, with 81% of them conducting online research before buying and 60% starting their research on a search engine.2

Digital management should be a priority for companies looking to increase brand awareness, acquire additional customers, and improve their reputation online.

Determining how to be noticed on digital mediums, and how to successfully market to and track the consumers who find you online, is vital to your business’ success. Making data-based decisions is always an important factor; this is true for your online marketing attribution as well as your offline attribution.

Having a solid digital management system in place helps ensure you are viewing the whole marketing journey, delivering content to your consumers in any possible way that they want it.

Digital Marketing and Web Analytics

To implement an effective digital strategy, you need to track your digital marketing and web analytics.

Web Analytics

Web analytics involves the process of the collection, measurement, and analysis of user activity on a website to understand and help achieve the intended objective of the website.

The objective is usually one or a combination of:

  • Increased revenue
  • Lower cost
  • Improved customer service/experience

Web analytics works alongside digital marketing. Web analytics can make certain that website content and the overall website user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) are tailored to the behavior and interests of the target audience.

You can monitor your website users and optimize your business’ website to appeal to the navigational tendencies of customers, formulating and updating your digital marketing plan of action depending on their interactions.

Digital Marketing

A lot of web analytics depend on digital marketing. Digital marketing is a term given to any form of marketing products and services through online channels. Channels are high-level categories indicating how people found a site. Put simply: where did they come from?

There are a few different channels that consumers use to find you in the digital world:

  • Organic
    • Traffic from users who land on your page from clicking a listed link on a search engine results page that was listed naturally – someone did not pay to get the result in high ranking.
  • Paid
    • Traffic from search engine results that is the result of paid advertising via Google Adwords or another paid search platform.
  • Direct
    • Traffic that has come to your site by either typing in your URL in their address bar or clicking on a bookmark. In general, this indicates visits where users navigate directly to the URL or the source of the visit is unknown.
  • Referral
    • Traffic that has come from another site to your site, not relating to traffic coming from a search engine.
      • Examples might include: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or any site/domain not owned by you.

SEM vs. SEO

A lot of digital marketing and web analytics depend on search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine optimization (SEO).

An easy way to remember these two differences is SEM is paid while SEO is not.

SEM is a form of internet marketing that increases a site’s visibility through paid search engine results and advertising; it includes things such as paid ads and 3rd party websites.

SEM results are short-lived, quick results. Usually you will pay per each result:

  • Cost per click (CPC)
  • Cost per lead (CPL)
  • Cost per acquisition (CPA)

SEO is an organic way of increasing the number of website visitors by getting your site to appear high in search ranking results.

SEO results are long-lasting; you must be vigilant with SEO to stay ahead of the trends. A few examples of ways to optimize your page for SEO are:

  • Publish relevant content
  • Improve page loading speed
  • Optimize images
  • Remove broken links
  • And much more

SEM and SEO are much more in-depth topics, but they both have a high impact on digital marketing and website optimization plans.

Find out how SEO and call tracking can work together
to help your brand.

Advertising on Digital

In addition to your static advertising campaigns, it is important to have digital advertising for your business, no matter what industry you are in. In fact, research shows that digital channels will overtake traditional mediums by 2021.3

Tracking offline to online (O2O) through dynamic number insertion
will help your marketing attribution efforts.

Hopefully, you are already advertising in digital, but whether or not you are, you may need some assistance in deciding exactly where to advertise. While it is vital that you do some research on what mediums your “ideal customers” spend time on, there are still many places to choose from, since there is a slew of options on the internet.

Although this isn’t a full, comprehensive list, below are some of the most popular places for businesses to place digital advertisements to get you started.

PPC

Pay-per-click advertising, also known as PPC, is a form of digital advertising that prompts advertisers to bid to have their ads displayed on popular websites to generate traffic.

Every time that an ad is clicked, the advertiser must pay a fee. PPC basically allows you to “buy” traffic for your website, web pages, or wherever you direct users to when they click on your ad. One of the most popular forms of PPC advertising is paid search advertising, also known as search engine advertising. This kind of digital advertising allows advertisers to bid for top ad placement on a search results page.

Google Adwords

Google Adwords reign so supreme in the world of PPC advertising platforms that Google Ads are now almost known as being synonymous with PPC.
With Google Ads, instead of bidding to have your ads displayed on popular websites, you must bid on certain keywords to have your ads displayed at the top of Google’s search results – a hard spot to earn organically by getting to the top of page one search results.

Bing

Second to Google is Bing, another popular search engine that has 34% share of the U.S. search market.4

Bing is a cheaper alternative to Google advertising since it is not as dominant in the market, yet still relevant. Bing partners with Yahoo for their ad network, which means your reach is expanded when advertising with Bing.

Bing lets you control campaigns at a more granular level than Yahoo and has more targeting options as well.

It is also relevant to note that voice-search is becoming increasingly popular, and power-house Amazon’s Alexa product gains all of its search results from Bing. Keep this in mind, as it may mean that Bing will become more prominent in the coming years.

Display Ads

Display advertising allows the advertiser to have ads placed on relevant third-party sites in the form of a banner, image, or text ad. They can be placed anywhere on the page – but must be optimized to target audiences, and should direct to a specific landing page as well.

Email Marketing

Most lead generation strategies are focused around collecting a form of contact – usually an email address – from a potential lead. Email marketing is said to be one of the most effective forms of digital advertising, with an ROI upwards of 40%, according to reports.5

Email marketing allows brands to talk to their prospects more personally on a consistent, ongoing basis. If a consumer is committing to receive your emails, then they have a higher probability of engaging with your brand.

With the potential for higher conversions than most other forms of digital advertising, email marketing is a must for any smart digital marketer.

Social Media

Advertising on social media keeps increasing since social media usage stays on the rise.

There are many social media platforms to advertise on. Make sure you discover where your “ideal customers” spend their time and target those social media channels to test out your advertising. Below are a few of the most popular platforms.

Facebook

Not surprisingly, Facebook dominates the social media world. As of 2018, almost 70% of U.S. adults are Facebook users, according to Pew Internet Research.6

YouTube

YouTube is also a top contender in social media channels, with roughly three-quarters of U.S. adults and 94% of 18-24-year-olds using the video-sharing site.6

Others

Below are some of the other most popular social media platforms that you should pay attention to, and research more to see if it is worth the effort for your business to advertise on. Keep in mind there are more than this list contains – make sure you know which social media platforms are most relevant to your business, your consumers, and your industry.

Twitter Instagram Snapchat
LinkedIn Pinterest WhatsApp

Video

Research shows that 25% of US digital ad spend went to video in 2018.5 The most common video advertising can be found on video channels such as YouTube, but keep in mind that social-media leader Facebook also captured almost one-quarter of all video ad spend in 2018.

Video isn’t only becoming more popular for digital ads – but a more popular way of consuming content overall, so you want to make sure that you are present in more types of ads than just static text or photo content.

Where to advertise

No matter where you choose to advertise, make sure your decisions are based on research and tested to see what your most viable digital advertising platforms really are. You will need to correctly attribute each platform with the attribution model that you choose that works best for your business’s needs, and whether cookie-based or a tracking component without cookies works for your tracking attribution purposes.

Correctly attribute online to offline marketing attribution

Once you start advertising on digital and paying attention to your paid and organic mediums online, you want to make sure you are attributing your ads correctly and efficiently.

To learn more about how DNI can help you achieve this, request a representative to reach out to you, or call us today at 888.788.0123.

Learn the complete consumer journey
for more reliable marketing ROI.

Get Dynamic Number insertion.

I want to learn more about dynamic number insertion.

References

  1. http://www.pewinternet.org/fact-sheet/internet-broadband/
  2. https://www.madebytribe.com/the-online-buyers-journey-infographic/
  3. https://www.emarketer.com/content/global-ad-spending
  4. https://advertise.bingads.microsoft.com/en-us
  5. https://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/email-marketing/2016/01/70-email-marketing-stats-you-need-to-know/
  6. http://www.pewinternet.org/2018/03/01/social-media-use-in-2018/
  7. https://www.emarketer.com/content/video-swells-to-25-of-us-digital-ad-spending

What Do Call Tracking and Digital Attribution Mean to My Practice?

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As someone who’s main focus in their career is to change peoples’ lives by helping them to hear, terms like “digital attribution” and “call tracking” may not be in the forefront of your mind as an audiologist or other hearing professional at work. Yet, as a business owner or manager, these are important things to know for your practice’s success.

You spend marketing dollars to acquire patients, so it is vital to know and understand how to use those dollars most effectively to benefit your practice and ensure you aren’t just throwing away money that could be used to help additional patients.

How do you make sure that you are marketing most effectively? Well, you need to make data-driven decisions. And how do you obtain data to do this?

That’s right – digital attribution and call tracking.

Here is a link to our podcast that explains what Dynamic Number Insertion (DNI) and online call tracking is.

Online vs. Offline Marketing

There are two main places where all of your marketing takes place – either online, or offline.
Think of some of the places where you are currently advertising, and you will see that they must fall into one of these categories:

Online Offline
Website Direct Mail
Facebook Newspaper
Third-Party Web pages Phonebook
Pay-Per-Click Billboard
Banner Ads TV/Radio

Just like these ads differ in their medium, so must the way that you can most successfully and accurately track and measure their success.

How do you most accurately track the success of both types of marketing campaigns? Again, this is where our key terms come in.

Online Offline
Digital Attribution & Call Tracking Call Tracking

 

Online Marketing

To see your consumers’ complete patient journey, you will need both digital attribution and call tracking in place on your online advertisements. Let’s look at an example.

  1. Potential patient googles “hearing aids in Los Angeles”
  2. They see a few practices come up in their google search and click on your website
  3. They browse your website for a bit and then continue to look at some of your competitors
  4. Potential patient comes back to your website and clicks around on a few web pages
  5. They click on the phone number on your page and call into your office to schedule an appointment

Here, the consumer started their journey online – that’s where the digital attribution will come into place. You should be able to see how they came upon your website, and what happened once on your website. Then, when they call into your office (through a tracking number on the website), you can allocate which number they called and that it came from your website, too.

By using dynamic number insertion (DNI), you can seamlessly tie in the consumer’s online interactions to their call for complete end-to-end , online to offline (O2O) attribution.

Offline Marketing

Tracking your offline marketing cannot get quite as fine-tune as you can get with online marketing since it is only possible to truly and accurately know what ad it was that drove them to call in finally.

For example, a patient can call in the office and tell you that they think they got your phone number from the newspaper – but with call tracking numbers in place, you can accurately assess which number they called you from (which may be a direct mail piece). Call tracking ensures that the final marketing attribution receives credit for driving the consumer to call your office to set an appointment.

If you were to only go off of what the caller tells your front office staff, you can run into errors of the person remembering incorrectly, or even risk not knowing at all if your phone handler forgets to ask the caller how they heard about you.

Not ready to start utilizing call tracking? Find out a DIY approach for marketing attribution!

You may have noticed that call tracking can and should be used in both online I offline marketing advertisements. Why is that? How may the type of phone numbers used differ in the two mediums? That brings us to our next topic.

Call Tracking Numbers vs. Dynamic Number Insertion (DNI)

You have probably heard of call tracking and are familiar with how it works – and perhaps you’ve heard of DNI with no clue what it means. Let’s explain the two.

Call tracking numbers are local or toll-free numbers used in place of regular telephone numbers to track and record inbound calls. Call tracking requires that you use separate tracking numbers on all of your different marketing pieces to attribute where your calls are coming from. The caller dials the tracking number, and then reaches the designated target number which is its destination (most likely your main office telephone number). Tracking numbers can be used in both online and offline advertisements.

Dynamic Number Insertion, most commonly referred to as simply DNI, uses a code placed on a website which allows the phone number on the page to change based on the keywords and actions taken in the web search. A URL is created for each specific number/keyword and sent to the web developer for implementation. DNI can use either local or toll-free numbers without issue. With DNI, you can more effectively track web traffic by breaking down searches to the referral site and keyword level. This is so online interactions to be tied to offline attribution.

It is evident that call tracking can be used in both online and offline advertisements, though DNI is prohibited to strictly online ads.

When to use should you use static call tracking numbers online, and when should you use DNI?

As noted above, DNI requires a code to be placed on the website you will be swapping out numbers with. Since this is necessary, it is difficult to use DNI in some online advertisements or places where you may market, since you do not have control of inserting this code. For example, a DNI number would not be something you could place on your Facebook page. In those cases, using regular call tracking numbers will suffice.

Discover how to place call tracking numbers on 7 of the most popular listing services here.

How Does This Improve My Practice?

There is no way to improve and fine-tune your marketing efforts without receiving the correct data to do so. Without tracking your marketing, you will not receive data.

This is why CallSource offers solutions using tracking numbers, DNI, or a combination – so you can correctly attribute all of your marketing sources both online and offline and make better-informed decisions on where and how to advertise in the future.

If you’re ready to talk to someone about improving your practice, we can have someone reach out to you, or you can contact a representative today at 888.788.0123 to learn more.

Start making more informed marketing decisions.

Take charge of your call and digital management.

I want to talk to someone about utilizing call tracking and DNI at my practice.

Call Tracking and SEO: Don’t be Afraid

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Search Engine Optimization – better known as SEO – is top of most marketers’ minds nowadays. To exist on the internet means to exist on page one of Google. And to do that, you must optimize your website for Google’s always-changing algorithms.

As a call tracking and business performance company, CallSource has knowledge of both the service of call tracking to help marketers and how SEO helps marketers as well. As such, there is a statement involving both of these that has to be made.

Call Tracking does not harm your SEO.

Call tracking and SEO working together; the rumor that call tracking harms your SEO is one of many myths about call tracking. Let’s dive into this topic and demystify this rumor to show that call tracking does not harm your SEO.

Call Tracking & SEO: The Beginning

In the earlier days of SEO, until a few years ago, it was always said that call tracking hurt SEO because of Google’s rule of businesses having a consistent NAP (name, address, and phone number) across all listings. Therefore, the consistency of a business’s information was key, and having multiple unique call tracking numbers on different listings was a big SEO no-no.

For example, if your main business line was listed on your website, but then you had different phone numbers in other business listings, Google would crawl all of these and negatively impact your SEO ranking because of the inconsistencies, making your business seem a bit less legitimate. As Google’s crawlers evolved, this practice was quickly stopped. This “fake fact” persists in the minds of folks who do not stay up-to-date in best SEO practices.

Call Tracking & SEO: Enhancements

Call tracking technologies, and SEO best practices have become more robust over the years, making these two work in unison much better than previously.

Dynamic Number Insertion

Call tracking is no longer strictly for static phone numbers – dynamic number insertion (DNI) has increased in popularity and its capabilities in the recent past.

Dynamic number insertion is a form of call tracking that uses a script that leaves your main business phone number in the background for Google to crawl; DNI displays a unique call tracking number to each user landing on the page.

DNI doesn’t conflict with any of SEO best practices since the script masks the actual number tied to the business. DNI provides deeper analytics and insights into your marketing, tying online and offline attribution.

The Evolution of SEO

The older days of SEO practices could be labeled a bit like the Wild West.

Content was being created for search engines and Google’s crawlers, instead of being created for people. To rank higher, marketers were creating things simply to follow the “rules” of what search engines are searching for, rather than the relevance or quality of the content. Things like keywords and backlinks were of highest priority, so the value of these web pages suffered and did not always deliver truly helpful results to users.

This led to a lot of use of applying “black hat” SEO practices to try to get a website to rank higher in Google. HubSpot has a great, succinct definition of black hat SEO:

“Black hat SEO is a practice against search engine guidelines, used to get a site ranking higher in search results. These unethical tactics don’t solve for the searcher and often end in a penalty from search engines. Black hat techniques include keyword stuffing, cloaking, and using private link networks.”

It is because of these bad practices that were running rampant that has caused SEO to evolve to look at the bigger picture, rather than just specific things being ranked as higher priority without much other context. Content that is created for real people, instead of just for search engines, will end up ranking higher organically because of its relevance and usefulness.

Google’s Updated NAP Rules

Google’s most recent guidelines for representing your business on Google states: “Provide a phone number that connects to your individual business location as directly as possible, or provide one website that represents your individual business location.”
Google also notes that a local phone number is preferred over a central call center helpline number whenever possible and that you may use additional phone numbers on Google My Business websites and other local services.

What does this mean?

Add your call tracking numbers (local prefixes are best) into the business phone number listing and then place your NAP (direct phone number) into the additional phone number sections within Google My Business.

Find the full step-by-step process of how to use a call tracking number in Google My Business here.

Google My Business is how businesses manage their local results and the phone numbers displayed in organic search results. An interesting note from Google’s language is that a phone number or a website are required. While this isn’t 100% clear, it could mean that you only need one NAP (Name, Address, Phone) match to be validated (phone or website). Most businesses haven’t even been claimed, verified, or setup on listing sites such as Google My Business correctly, so make sure to take some time to complete the process.

Download the top 7 places to display your static call tracking numbers online.

Google My Business and Call Tracking

Google wants to optimize its search engines for the ultimate customer experience – so, rules aren’t quite as inflexible as they used to be.

Today, companies are using call tracking to improve their online and offline marketing and the customer experience. Call tracking; especially DNI, is imperative for businesses that advertise online and offline.

Get started with call tracking to improve your SEO and customer experience

You no longer have to be afraid of using call tracking and bettering your SEO for your business – the two are not mutually exclusive.

Ready to have someone reach out to you? We’ll have a representative contact you, or feel free to reach us today at 888.788.0123 to learn more.

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