How important is call tracking in the world of digital marketing?

And how does CallTrackingMetrics in particular help digital marketers?

With so many features and functions in our software, we support a pretty diverse spectrum of customers – from small local businesses, to cutting-edge advertising agencies, to international contact centers.

Of this wide variety of clients, we find that digital marketing agencies are particularly well-served by our platform. They’re able to pick and choose from a robust feature set that supports their business model extremely well. Jason Smith, a senior member of our sales team, has spent the last few years helping digital marketers get the most out of CallTrackingMetrics. We absolutely consider him an expert in this use case, so this week we took a few moments to ask Jason about his experience working with agencies.

You always ask our callers what problem they’re looking to solve with CallTrackingMetrics. When it comes to marketing agencies, what’s the most common answer to that question?

Most of the time, agencies are looking for ways to prove their worth to their clients. There’s often a black hole in attributing phone calls back to digital marketing efforts. For example, it’s pretty easy to dispute that spikes in calls are the result of word-of-mouth or other organic channels. What we actually see is that, for most companies, visitors often pick up the phone and call as a result of seeing an ad.

We provide the call tracking tools for a marketing agency to attribute just about every single phone call that comes in, so that they can measure the reaction to both the online and offline marketing campaigns that they’re running for their clients.

When an agency can show real data on exactly where their client’s calls come from, it’s hard to dispute the results of their marketing efforts.

What are some of the go-to features that you point out when running through discovery with this type of user?

Hands down, the first thing I like to mention is the agency account structure that CallTrackingMetrics provides. That really sets us apart from the other vendors in this field.

Our platform enables an agency to provide safe, truly segmented access to their client’s individual call data. When agencies are billing their clients for their particular instance of our software, we offer a ton of flexibility in how that billing is set up. We can even deliver a version of our software that is completely white-labeled. That is, our user interface can be visually re-packaged to appear as though it’s coming directly from the agency itself.

Along with our white label, another well-received feature are our incredibly deep integrations with Google Adwords, Google Analytics, and Bing Ads. Our capabilities within those integrations almost always result in “ooohs” and “ahhhs” during my demos with prospective clients!

Basically, our integrations go both ways … which means that we can sync our call data to both Google and Bing’s platforms to enhance your reporting there, as well as leverage some of the data within Google and Bing to augment your CallTrackingMetrics account.  Both of these “data highways” are completely transparent, so you can be certain the data communicated back and forth is perfectly accurate. This alone really makes us an appealing alternative to some of the other solutions out there.

Can you tell me more about white-labeling? What options do resellers have for that?

Well, our Marketing Pro plan comes with the ability to offer a custom-branded version of our software, which would be hosted on our domain, calltrackingapp.com. So, the sub-clients would sign in on digitalagencyname.calltrackingapp.com, for example.

In this scenario, agencies can replace our logo with their own, customize the help section, customize where they direct their end users for support, and, of course, re-brand our standard operational communications (for example, emails regarding payment declines and system-generated messages).

Outside of our standard plan, we can completely strip all of our branding from the software – for an additional fee. This is what we call a “true” white-label. In a true white-label, a reseller can host a customized version of the CallTrackingMetrics platform on a subdomain of their own. So, when their sub-clients login, they can use a URL like calls.digitalagencyname.com.

This setup actually removes all links that might accidentally take a customer or prospect back to the CallTrackingMetrics marketing site (or any other branded content). Imagine utilizing this premium white-label solution! A marketing agency can offer a platform that genuinely looks and feels like something they are hosting, and providing directly to their clients.

That sounds great, but then how do marketing agencies and other resellers typically handle billing their end users?

We actually offer a lot of options on the billing side, so clients can choose whatever works best for their business model. Of course, a marketing agency can pay us directly for their client’s usage, and then invoice their user for call tracking as a line item on their existing bill. A reseller can also have their clients pay us directly for their own usage of the software. In that billing model, each sub-client would have their own card on file for usage charges, and then the hosting agency would just pay a single flat-rate subscription fee on top of that.

There’s a third method of billing that I think is really cool, through our integration with Stripe. With our Stripe integration, resellers can add their own custom price markups to any of the a-la-carte features that we offer. So, a marketing agency with sub-clients using CallTrackingMetrics can individually mark-up things like tracking numbers, minutes, transcriptions, use of spam detective, etc. Billing via our Stripe integration also works well for marketing companies that want to offer a fixed cost-per-call option for selling leads.

Is there anything else we should know about regarding the connection between call tracking and digital marketing?

I’ve done a lot of research over the years to make sure that I’m giving accurate information to prospective clients. And, honestly, it comes down to the fact that we offer a more robust feature set than any of the other vendors I’ve encountered in this industry. On top of that, we’ve built in a lot of room for clients to customize their own version of CallTrackingMetrics, far beyond the stiff and inflexible interfaces I’ve seen offered by other platforms.

Every prospective client I meet has their own particular set of problems that they’re hoping we can solve. When it comes to digital marketing agencies and other resellers of our software, we offer an especially rich array of solutions. For as many features as we’ve packed into the CallTrackingMetrics platform, it’s still incredibly agile and endlessly flexible.

With tools like white-labeling, premium integrations, and API developer support, a user can completely mold our software into a truly customized platform that supports their particular objectives.

I would encourage anyone who conducts all or part of their business over the phone to check out a demo of CallTrackingMetrics. Here in our headquarters, account executives are specially trained to construct a customized solution for your business objectives.

Whether you need call attribution, international text messaging support, or a complete cloud phone system infrastructure, I guarantee that we have features that can help you.