For many businesses, everything from local stores to SaaS providers, call metrics are crucial for proving the effectiveness of inbound campaigns.

Without call metrics, it’s impossible to determine how many inbound calls were the result of a billboard advertisement, Google Maps listing, social promotion, or AdWords ad.

With call metrics, marketers can connect conversions made during inbound calls back to the marketing campaigns that generated them.

This provides a clearer picture of marketing ROI.

If you work in marketing for a business that makes sales through inbound calls, or if your agency does marketing for these types of businesses, it’s important to capture all marketing-generated leads and revenue with <a href="https://www.ruleranalytics.com/call-tracking/">call tracking analytics</a>.

Here are the five call metrics you need to measure.

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<h3>1. Call Volume</h3>
Tracking call volume is just as important as tracking website visits. While neither really provides a clear picture of marketing-generated revenue, both can highlight when things are working and when they’re not.

For example, say you take time to optimise your business’ Google Maps profile. You add enticing images, include as much detail as possible in all available fields, and respond to both positive and negative reviews.

Shortly after completing that project, you notice a significant increase in call volume. If your KPI for updating the Maps profile was to increase inbound calls by X%, you can track call volume metrics to determine whether or not your changes were successful.

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<h3>2. Call Source</h3>
If your business has a sales team that handles inbound calls, it’s likely that your main business phone number is listed in hundreds of places—both online and offline.

In order to differentiate between calls that were generated by a local billboard and those coming from your Google Maps listing, you need a call tracking system that provides individual phone numbers for each campaign.

With distinct campaign phone numbers, marketers can see exactly what campaigns and ads drove the most, and least, inbound calls, so you know exactly where to focus your efforts in the future.

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<h3>3. Previous Interactions</h3>
For businesses with complex sales cycles, an inbound call to sales is rarely the first interaction between the prospect and the brand. It’s much more likely that the prospect conducted a significant amount of research on your website before making the decision to speak with sales.

For this reason, it’s important to track interactions that occurred prior to the inbound call. What keywords brought the prospect to your website originally? What content and sales pages were viewed? With a platform like <a href="https://www.ruleranalytics.com/">Ruler Analytics</a> that’s built to capture both website and call metrics, you can monitor the digital journey prior to the inbound call.

Ruler Analytics collects information about how visitors interact with digital content, and dynamically serves each website visitor a different phone number. This highlights which marketing techniques—SEO, PPC, content, email, etc.—are most effective at driving prospects deeper into the purchasing funnel.

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<h3>4. Time of Day</h3>
If you’re driving inbound calls through AdWords or another PPC provider, time of day is an important call metric to track. Over time, tracking the time of day when calls most commonly come in allows you identify patterns that can help you set better PPC bids.

For example, say one of your clients is a theme park. After monitoring call times for three months, you notice that the highest number of inbound calls come in around noon on Friday. The lowest number of calls come in during business hours Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday.

Knowing this, you can adjust your bids to gain more visibility on Friday afternoons when most people are searching for theme parks. To make up for the increased ad budget on Fridays, you can reduce or eliminate ad spend Monday through Wednesday when fewer people are looking for theme parks.

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<h3>5. Conversions</h3>
While each of the other four metrics are important and helpful for campaign optimisation, conversions is the most important for tracking marketing ROI.

To track conversions from inbound calls, you need a call tracking platform that integrates directly with your CRM system. If the CRM and call tracking platform are integrated, they can communicate back and forth about inbound calls and the sales that are made on those calls.

For example, say a prospect spends three months researching your brand. They find your website by searching for a specific keyword, views some sales and pricing pages, and subscribes to your email list. Over the next few months, he reads content sent in your email newsletter, and he often follows links in that content to read your other blog posts.

Finally, after a few months, he calls to talk to a sales representative.

After a few calls, he converts.

Imagine that the prospect was the CTO of a huge corporation and the sale was massive.

The sale was obviously generated by marketing—SEO, content, and email marketing all led to the eventual purchase, but without connected website and call metrics, marketing can’t prove that it was responsible for generating that revenue.

With a platform like Ruler Analytics that connects call and website metrics, you can <a href="https://www.ruleranalytics.com/blog/analytics/marketing-analytics/">close the loop between marketing and sales</a> by tracking sales conversions back to marketing campaigns.

As the conversion is recorded by sales in the CRM, it’s passed back to Ruler Analytics and merged with all of the historical campaign interaction data.

This allows marketers to track specific amounts of revenue generated by both online and offline campaigns.

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<h3>Call Metrics Complete the Puzzle of Marketing ROI</h3>
Marketing teams are no longer allowed to lean on metrics like increased foot/web traffic, call volume, and visibility.

The C-suite wants to know exactly how their investment in marketing is growing the business, and that’s only possible if marketers are able to prove how much revenue their campaigns are generating.

Call metrics complete the marketing ROI puzzle.

When combined with website analytics, marketers can track exactly how many conversions their campaigns and initiatives are driving, regardless of whether the conversion was the result of seeing a television commercial or months of research on your website.