Call Tracking For Franchises

Given that we are exhibiting at The International Franchise Association’s Annual Convention this week in Las Vegas, I wanted to describe how franchises are using CallTrackingMetrics call tracking tools to manage advertising and performance across their organizations.

Background: 

CallTrackingMetrics works with franchises in all phases of growth from 2-3 franchisees to thousands. There are common threads in our conversations with these organizations:

The franchisor is often responsible (and paid by the franchisees) for a good chunk of the advertising that happens for the brand.

The franchisor wants to be able to track what the franchisees are doing with the leads that are going to them from the advertising and the franchisee wants to know that they are getting something for the advertising dollars they are sending to the central office.

In addition, often the franchisees want to do their own local/personalized advertising in their own markets and the central office would like them to track how those are going so they can potentially replicate across other markets.

This is the perfect scenario for call tracking for several reasons: 

1. Many franchises are service based businesses where a lot of leads still are coming in via phone.
2. These are often highly competitive industries where a single ad click can easily cost $30+ or more and being able to track calls back to those ads is critical to make sure the ads are working. They can also be high ticket services with hundreds of dollars on the line in each call.
3. Calls are a wealth of information with call recording, scoring, and keyword spotting providing info on how the calls are going and what revenue is coming out of them.

How do franchises typical set up their call tracking program in CTM? 

1. Account Structure: CallTrackingMetrics offers the ability to have a master and child account structure (through the growth and connect plans) so the central franchise office can create a master account that has a holistic view of performance and create child (“sub”) accounts for each franchisee location. The franchisee employees/managers can have access to their respective child account. The central office can choose to house nationwide/central tracking phone numbers in the master account and then place local/franchisee specific tracking numbers in the child accounts.
2. Local Numbers For Every Location: In addition to tracking calls coming into main vanity/toll free lines for the franchise nationally, many organizations set up individual local tracking numbers for each of the franchisees. This is particularly useful if you have a website where you list out of all of your franchisees and their phone numbers. Each of those can be tracking numbers. You can even make them dynamically change depending on the advertising channel the website visitor is coming through.
3. Georouting National Numbers: National tracking numbers that are used in large advertising campaigns can be The International Franchise Association’s Annual Conventionso that callers end up exactly where they need to be and central offices don’t need to have a call center taking calls.
4. White Labeling/API Integration: Franchises wanting to provide their franchisees with access to this information have a number of options. They can white label the software and have their franchisees log in, they could leverage our API/webhooks to import the information in automatically into their own internal software, or leverage integrations we already have in place with systems like SalesForce, Google Analytics/Adwords etc.

What types of advertising are Franchises tracking? 

1. National advertising campaigns: When running broad ads in mediums like print and TV, franchises want the ability to know exactly how many calls are coming from each ad. They also want to be able to see which franchisee the call was georouted to and what the outcome of the call was.
2. Online advertising campaigns: Franchises will often run national and local PPC and display ads. Tracking numbers can be tied to specific advertising channels (like Google Adwords, Bing Ads, Facebook, Display, Social Media, Organic, Local Search etc.) and when the visitor lands on the franchise website/landing page, they will see a tracking number specific to that channel. Once a call is placed, we immediately report on the exact visit that led to the call (and send that information back into systems like Google Analytics and Adwords) so that campaigns can be optimized around calls.
3. Local Franchisee Specific Campaigns: Does your franchisee want to advertise in a local publication or hand out fliers in their area? Provide them access to their sub account and they can search for and purchase tracking numbers to track every campaign they are doing. Campaigns that do well can be highlighted and replicated across other areas.

What can franchises do with the call tracking information? 

The short answer is there is wealth of information in your calls! Lets start with some of the more obvious:

1. Optimize advertising spend around those ads that generate calls.
2. Optimize websites and landing pages around those pages that are generating calls and the keywords generating calls.
3. See reporting on which franchisees are getting calls, missing calls, when the calls are coming in (time of day, day of week etc) to make sure calls are being answered and not missed. Uncover potential staffing issues and performance issues just by looking at the call metrics.

Some more interesting things you could do: 

1. Have your franchisees mark calls with scoring and conversion information so you can view how much revenue is coming from each advertising campaign, the quality of the calls and view conversion statistics by franchisee. Imagine being able to know how much revenue is coming from each of your campaigns?
2. Choose to record the calls and have your managers use the call recordings as great training tools and also hear what callers are asking for.
3. Turn on keyword spotting for your calls so that the system will automatically categorize the calls along product lines, tone of call, if appointments were scheduled etc so you can filter reporting across your franchise using these tags.
4. Turn on premium caller ID and collect the name and address of each of the callers calling your franchise. Use that information to create a targeted mailing list for promotions.

Interested in talking more about how CallTrackingMetrics can help your franchise? Contact us and we would be delighted to demo the software in action.