When you are working with a company on a private lead generation campaign, the company will sometimes need to receive the leads by phone calls. Obviously its much easier to track online leads, but call tracking is not as hard as you might think. There a variety of paid services available to track and log phone leads, but now you can do it for free with Google Voice.
Here are the steps to track phone leads with Google Voice
1. Set up a Google Voice account for the campaign. The phone number you choose is the one you will advertise in your ads.
2. Set up the forwarding number to the business. This will automatically forward calls from the Google number to the business phone. You can also set up groups if the business has multiple phone numbers or departments to take the lead calls. Be sure you turn off call screening so the call goes right through. Your call conversion rate will drop if customers have to listen to the Google Voice prompts. You want a seamless call for the end user.
3. Start the campaign. The company will now get their calls directly from the ads, and you can track each call from your computer in your Google Voice account. Each call will generate a log entry in your call history section along with the time, date. Each entry is essentially a conversion. Assign your CPA price for each call. Then you can export this for your reports and billing invoices for the customer.
Some businesses might want to use the voicemail option after hours to capture calls when no one is on staff to answer the phone. Those can be transcribed and read from the Google Voice panel. You can do things like offer the customer a reduced CPA rate for voicemail calls to still capture some revenue on those leads.
This might not be the most robust method as far as analytics, but its a solid way to track all calls generated from an ad for billing purposes. You don’t have to rely on a busy company to track their incoming calls manually and report to you the totals. The data is all in your control from your Google Voice account. Best of all, its free!
Great post. Hope I can put it to use on the next client.. phone leads are a pita
Great idea Chad. I was pondering this solution. Have you found that the numbers G provides to be clean? By clean, I mean the number doesn’t receive numerous calls not relevant to the campaign.
No, we haven’t noticed those kind of residual calls from the Google number.
Best post yet, Chad. Thank you!
Rock on. I’ve already started doing this and it’s working out great! I just wish we could get a 1-800 number for free since, but this still works great for local stuff too. Great post!
This is great information! Thanks for the tips!
Chad,
After thinking about this a bit more, could this be a privacy issue? If a lead leaves a voicemail, won’t we be able to hear it?
Can you send me an invite please?
This is awesome information! Many Thanks for the great tips!
Excellent idea. Regular call tracking services can be way too complex and expensive for many clients. This is a very simple solution that will at least give marketers credit for the phone leads that are being generated from specific campaigns. If anyone has a Google Voice invite, please send it my way! mary at seoverflow.com
Wow this is a great service to offer for free. I remember at a previous job they were paying about $10K a month just for this capability. Tracking phone calls is extremely important if you get a significant number of phone orders. Those orders should all be tracked just like online orders, otherwise your conversion rates and stats are all out of whack.
Hey Chad, great post. I read this a while back but now have a quick question. Are you just creating multiple google voice accounts so that you can have one number for each customer’s campaign? Or is there a way to get multiple google voice number?
Thanks,
Jason
I have never even thought of Google Voice for Business purposes , Great Post
Btw Off Topic
If anybody needs invites to Google Voice to get started with this post , I will be glad to give it to you , Just email me ( info @ thexrsnetwork . com )
This is awesome, only one bad point, it’s NOT available up here in the great White North (Canada). I read there are some ways around it (for Canadians to sneak in and get it) but I am still waiting for my Google Voice invite to be sent to me.
I was looking at other phone tracking systems and they cost $100 per phone number kind of steep, especially when you have this option from Google for completely free.
Hopefully they get this up and running Canada soon.