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Home > eCommerce Digital Marketing Blog > eCommerce Strategy > KPIs and Reporting > The Best eCommerce Call Tracking Providers

The Best eCommerce Call Tracking Providers

Posted By Mike Belasco on August 28, 2018

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Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in 2012 and has now been updated for 2018 to reflect an increased number of call tracking providers.

Tracking phone calls from your website can give you excellent insight into not only the success of your campaigns in terms of generating the calls, but also customer insights such as frequently asked questions, compliments!

There are several different tools on the marketing ranging from a “roll your own” type call tracking solution to enterprise level call tracking solutions. Some solutions even offer features beyond tracking of the calls such as distribution of calls to a phone bank and more.

When it comes to site optimization, it’s important that the provider ties phone calls back to the specific site session, so it ties the GA data to the user. So you get not only how many calls, but which pages the visitor saw. (Did they look at specific products? A specific piece of content? A blog post?) Lead attribution is the number one thing you need out of call tracking software or its not very useful. (Unfortunately, many trackers don’t really do this well). That can be a key differentiator.

Here are a few providers that we’ve looked into for not only ourselves but also for our eCommerce clients:

CallRail *Call Rail Logo

CallRail *(Affiliate Link) was inspired by my blog post a few years back on how to roll your own call tracking system using Twilio. Twilio is a very cool voice application API with tons of features. CallRail has taken the “roll your own” idea and put it on steroids with an easy to use configuration interface and nice looking, useful reporting features. The price is right for small businesses starting at $30 per month which includes 10 tracking numbers and 500 minutes of call time which should be plenty for most businesses. The setup wizard walks you through provisioning numbers and setting up tracking rules for who should see your tracking number (organic visitors, Google PPC, etc.)

We’ve had great support from the founder Andy and his team who quickly fix any bugs we find and are very responsive in adding new features and answering quick questions. They also have an affiliate program which is nice so that we can send our clients directly to CallRail and not have to send our clients a phone bill each month.

The CallRail solution is also “local SEO friendly” meaning it works via number replacement using JavaScript. This means the search engines still see your real phone number persevering your local NAP consistency. While there has been some debate as to whether this is “cloaking” or whether it could harm you local SEO in anyway we’ve not seen any evidence of this with dozens of clients.

The downside to CallRail unfortunately also lies with the backend that makes it so powerful, Twilio. While phone numbers directly from Twilio are relatively cheap ($1 per local number per month, and 1 cent per minute), they are not cheap enough to create a “number pool” so that each visitor session could be assigned a unique number. Number pooling would allow keyword level details for call tracking which could add a ton of value both for SEO and PPC purposes. Another downside to CallRail is that as of the time of this writing there is no replacement feature if your phone number happens to be in an image. In the past we’ve modified the roll-your-own method to replace images, so we do understand why as of now this isn’t exactly scalable.

AvidTrak

AvidTrak Logo

AvidTrak is a tool that our CRO team has recently worked with. Especially when it comes to conversion, you want your system to be able to log the data into GA, the user, and integrate their data with other systems (like your CRM) – which is what our client had in mind when using AvidTrak. Our team appreciated the tool’s capabilities but did mention that AvidTrak’s reporting interface can feel somewhat clunky.

Similar to CallRail, AvidTrak’s Toll Free or Local Call Tracking Numbers can be dynamically inserted into a page (using a snippet of JavaScript code) or simply hard coded onto a page. And their pricing starts at just $2.00 per month (phone number monthly rental rate) and increases at $0.07/minute for toll numbers and $0.06 per minute for local (you can also reference their full list of prices based on country if you’re outside of the US).

CallTrackingMetrics *

CallTrackingMetrics Logo

CallTrackingMetrics *(Affiliate Link) is another provider we’ve looked at for eCommerce clients. One of the specific highlight features of CallTrackingMetrics, when it comes to eCommerce, is that it also has a Shopify plugin. Which means your sales and support team can see customers’ information (including their complete order history and even how they found your store) right away. This can be incredibly beneficial for brands that sell complicated or customizable products that might require a little more engagement to ensure customer satisfaction.

Although their pricing comes in a little higher, starting at $19/month plus usage for small businesses, the platform offers a variety of features in a relatively easy to use dashboard. Additionally, users can view reports that help you understand which of your campaigns are driving phone leads so you can get a clear view of your ROI.

Invoca

Invoca Logo

Although Invoca seems to focus more primarily on financial and insurance brands, they hold the potential to be a good option for eCommerce businesses that rely heavily on the relationship between marketing efforts and inbound calls to help drive revenue. Invoca places emphasis on making things easier and smoother for marketers which is part of why they offer a variety of integrations across platforms and tools including Salesforce, Google Ads, Facebook, Adobe, and Instagram. Additionally, Invoca also uses artificial intelligence to pull data from conversations themselves to help marketers and sales team members recognize a prospect’s level of intent.

Unfortunately, Invoca doesn’t provide pricing information on their website (your price is determined by which of their products you choose to use for your business) so you’ll have to contact them to learn more.

 

Ultimately, as I mentioned previously, these solutions offer some very interesting features but the technology still leaves something to be desired. Over time, as user behavior evolves and Click-To-Call technology continues to become an increasingly expected practice, call tracking will ultimately change and become even more useful and maybe even in some cases, more specific to the needs of eCommerce brands.

Note: Interested in using call tracking for your eCommerce business? Fill out the form below to contact us today!

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14 Comments on "The Best eCommerce Call Tracking Providers"
  1. Andy Powell says:
    March 5, 2012 at

    Mike, thanks for the great writeup and for the kind words about CallRail. We’re working hard to be the best call tracking provider for local businesses and agencies, and I sincerely appreciate the feedback.

    Our keyword-level call tracking feature, based on number pooling, will be released this month. (I’m using it already.) We’d love for you to give it a try and offer your feedback.

    Also, image swapping is available but currently undocumented. I’ll write those docs today and send them to you.

    Thanks again!

    Reply
    • Mike Belasco says:
      March 5, 2012 at

      awesome andy, can’t wait to check out the new stuff!

      Reply
  2. Stuart Draper says:
    March 5, 2012 at

    I have used Marchex and it has been useful. Thanks for the tips on these tools. Has anyone else used MyNextCustomer? It sounds like a pretty good one for local call tracking, but I haven’t tried it.

    Reply
  3. Cody Baird says:
    March 5, 2012 at

    Wow Mike, super valuable post for any local seo that grinds it out daily for their clients just to have them not appreciate or attribute their success in the right direction. Thanks so much for this post. I can wait to call these 2 companies tomorrow!

    Reply
  4. Mike Haeg says:
    March 5, 2012 at

    Hey Mike,

    Appreciate the kind words and taking time to spread the call tracking Gospel. The value gets overlooked and it’s great to have you as an ambassador.

    CI would like to think we aren’t too “unknown” 🙂 as we have a large footprint in a variety of industries, especially automotive.

    Our ability to track calls down to the keyword level is very important. Too often the marketers are left in the dark and not getting credit where due. We’re happy to fix that.

    Also, one final point is your mention of tagging the call afterward. We love to see businesses take the extra couple seconds to identify the call afterward. Over a year ago we rolled out Humanatic which goes the next step. We have live, English speaking, reviewers listen to phone calls and quickly mark them as a new business opportunity or not. This allows for a much more manageable effort in listening to and reviewing your calls. Check out Humanatic.com

    Thanks again Mike!

    Reply
  5. Chris Reilly says:
    March 6, 2012 at

    Love your post Mike. We’ve been using Marchex Call Analytics for a while now. It works great but cost is way out of whack relative to call rail. We’re definitely going to check it out.

    Reply
  6. Jason Stinnett says:
    March 7, 2012 at

    “While CI also uses Javascript to retrieve and print the tracking number to your webpage, their code does not utilize number replacement, meaning your “real” number goes away entirely.”

    We use IfByPhone, which we’ve been happy with as a basic, cost effective solution for some of our smaller clients. It sounds like CI uses a similar javascript approach as IfByPhone. The solution we came up with was to leave the NAP standard phone number in place in a noscript tag.

    This should probably be done regardless to make sure that the small percentage of people who have javascript disabled have any phone number to call…

    Reply
  7. Andrew says:
    April 6, 2012 at

    Have you seen https://www.analyticcalltracking.com

    Looks like a good cheap alternative if you dont need keyword level tracking!

    Reply
  8. Pashmina says:
    November 9, 2012 at

    Mike, just wondering if you tried out the CallRail phone number pooling on the per keyword level. And if you have, does this now make CallRail just as good or better than Century?

    Reply
    • Mike Belasco says:
      November 9, 2012 at

      yes we’ve tried it and most of our clients are on it now. I think this makes it way better in most cases. It is basically like the call becomes part of the Google Analytics session, not just a random page view by some server some where. It is pretty cool how CallRail built this. I didn’t think it was possible for a long time.

      Reply
  9. Jim Jackson says:
    December 6, 2012 at

    Mike, how does Google limiting keyword referral data affect Call Rail’s keyword level tracking?

    Reply
    • Mike Belasco says:
      December 6, 2012 at

      Hey Jim,
      It would track to (not provided) just like any other conversion on the site. The whole thing on Google’s part is annoying eh?

      Reply
  10. Floor City says:
    October 18, 2019 at

    Call Tracking Metrics is the only one I’ve found that integrates with Shopify. We are very happy with their products and even their CEO has met with me to discuss features they lack. What more can you ask for.

    Reply
    • Mike Belasco says:
      October 18, 2019 at

      thanks andrew will check it out!

      Reply

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Mike Belasco

Mike Belasco has been an entrepreneur and digital marketer since 2003. He’s been the CEO of Inflow (founded as seOverflow) since 2007 and has led Inflow to five Denver’s Fastest-Growing Private Company awards and three Inc. 5000 awards. In 2009, he also founded ConversionIQ, which was acquired by Inflow in 2014.

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