Phone Number Tracking for Local Small Business

The beauty of marketing your business on the internet is that you can track almost everything.  Except phone calls.  Phone calls are the red headed step-children of tracking.  They stand alone, ignored off in the corner.

Even many otherwise reputable agencies forget about phone calls.  Sure, they may use a single, different number for a business’s website, but they’re probably not even tracking different click sources (Adwords, Adcenter, etc) much less tracking phone calls at the keyword level.

The status quo behavior of neglecting to track phone calls especially hurts small local businesses.  When is the last time you set an appointment with your dentist online?

I believe that the problem of tracking phone calls is a big part of the reason that local businesses are having trouble getting it together online.  How can you justify the expense and commitment of designing a website after you only get a dozen “contact us” form submissions in your first year?

I think we need better and less expensive call tracking systems for small and local businesses.  And I’m not the only one.

Unfortunately, there’s a reason that small and local businesses don’t track their calls.  It’s either very difficult or very expensive.

I don’t have a solution for you right now, but I am working on one.  In the meantime, for a very complete but expensive solution, try Mongoose Metrics.  If you want the budget solution, buy some of your own phone numbers and set up some basic tracking.  You can get one free number from Google Voice.  After that, try FlowRoute.  It’s inexpensive and pretty good in my experience.