Call tracking helps you monitor and improve the effectiveness of marketing campaigns. But what’s the best implementation to give you that insight and data on marketing success and budget spend?

To help us answer this question, we spoke with Head of Marketing, Faye Thomassen at Mediahawk, our call tracking and marketing attribution partner.

Call tracking gives you a comprehensive view of every call that comes in to your dental practice, enabling you to attribute enquiries and revenue to marketing spend.

You can quickly and easily see which marketing activity generated your lead enquiries, which web pages they looked at before, during and after the call, along with a recording of the call conversation – and more.

As a dentist, you rely heavily on the telephone to bring in enquiries, both from online and offline marketing efforts. Let’s say you’re running several adverts in local publications, PPC campaigns and you’re targeting various keywords for SEO. Some adverts are probably pulling more weight than others, as are certain keywords for those Google Ads campaigns.

But how do you know which campaigns are working best for you and which aren’t worth the budget?

By placing unique telephone numbers across your campaigns, you can see which are bringing in patients and which aren’t working as well.

For example

Let’s say you’re advertising teeth whitening on Facebook that, but it’s doesn’t seem to be resulting in a burst of new leads submitting their details. However, you are finding that you’ve had an increase in calls from prospects looking to start whitening treatment.

By using a call tracking service, such as Mediahawk, you would be able to track those calls back and find that the Facebook ad that’s not producing new leads from form submissions, is actually inspiring leads to pick up the phone and call the practice – therefore explaining the increase in call volume as well as indicating a high level of success for that marketing spend.

This insight helps prevent wasted marketing spend, avoids the mistake of taking away a key source of your enquiries, and increases your return on investment. Ultimately, it can help you focus your efforts on the right marketing mix that gets your phone ringing and fills your appointment book.

This is a great question, and one we’re asked a lot! There are two types of call tracking numbers to consider, depending on your marketing and reporting needs:

Dynamic numbers are used on your website, and we recommend they appear on every page of your site. Each visitor sees a unique phone number, so when they call your practice you can identify the traffic source, keyword and what pages they looked at.

If you don’t have a number on every page of your website, you miss out on all that rich data.

Static numbers are then a single trackable phone number that you use for a specific marketing purpose. For example, you can have one phone number on your brochure, a different number on a printed advert, another one on your emails, and so on.

Using different numbers for each type of media enables you to identify which marketing and advertising efforts generated each call you receive. These static numbers can be grouped into campaigns and channels too, to analyse individual performance.

Definitely! If someone calls from a landline, Mediahawk can identify their region, county, town and even the first part of a post code. Plus, it can provide details such as what day, time, and hour people call you, which can help determine staffing levels and resources too.

Yes! If you’re using a standard landline, you may not know how the phones are being answered, and whether staff follow procedures when talking to leads. Is an up-selling opportunity missed? Maybe they’re not entering all of the leads details into DenGro?

By listening to calls, you can catch these opportunities and implement the relevant training to improve.

One of my favourite features is speech analytics. It enables you to quickly categorise and analyse calls. For instance, if the caller says ”I’d like to register”, or ”how much does it cost?” Mediahawk can pick up on those keywords and group these as ‘Enquiry’ calls; excluding them from ‘admin’ or ‘customer service related’ enquiries. You can then segment the calls in your reports and monitor them individually.

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