How Call Tracking Transformed our Digital Marketing Agency

I often tell our clients that marketing without call tracking isn’t much different than gambling. If you don’t know what works and what doesn’t, achieving sustainable success in marketing is highly unlikely.

-John Thornton, CEO, Black Propeller

Marketing without call tracking isn’t much different than gambling

Black Propeller, an industry leader in digital marketing and PPC management, started working with CallTrackingMetrics in 2013. Since then, they’ve experienced a total transformation in how they gather and measure data. Recently, we spoke with Black Propeller CEO, John Thornton, to see if he had any advice for agencies seeking to prove results to their clients.

John, how were you tracking calls prior to working with CallTrackingMetrics?

Prior to CallTrackingMetrics, we were using CallRail briefly as our tracking provider. However, they didn’t offer much product support, and their attribution wasn’t as granular as we needed it to be.

Before working with CallRail, we just weren’t tracking or recording phone conversations at all. That made it difficult to demonstrate true ROI, and thus more challenging to prove value to our clients.

Why did you reach out to CallTrackingMetrics in particular?

After struggling with the lack of support provided by CallRail, we were initially attracted to CTM for their free training resources and personal customer service.

CallTrackingMetrics offers extensive learning resources for both new and seasoned customers, so it was easy for our team to learn at our own pace. Their technical support team is very responsive and we can reach out and talk to a live person as needed. We were able to get all of the features we needed, along with outstanding customer support and free training—for less than we were paying before.

We also love showing support for local businesses, and once we learned that CTM was also headquartered here in our home state of Maryland, it was a done deal!

What business challenges were you trying to solve with our platform, and how have we helped?

Prior to call tracking, we had difficulty demonstrating the effectiveness of our marketing efforts to our clients. We had no tangible evidence that our campaigns were driving phone calls and leads. As a result, our clients would often mis-attribute leads generated by Black Propeller to other campaign sources. All agencies share the same challenge of being able to show real results to our clients, and we were looking for a platform that could provide actionable insights.

CallTrackingMetrics has empowered us with proof; we can now provide our clients with tangible results. We love that we’re able to produce instant reporting on multiple metrics—and can even export data right from the call log! And, our clients love that we are consistently able to provide visibility into the effectiveness of their campaigns.

Beyond the direct benefits to our clients, our internal workflow is also easier with CallTrackingMetrics. We are able to easily monitor both granular and high-level data on our marketing campaigns, allowing us to efficiently connect the dots between clicks and calls. This information makes it possible to hone our strategy by 1) exposing which ads/keywords are driving the most calls, and 2) which campaigns are bringing in the most revenue.

Which features do you find the most useful in your industry?

Out of all the features available to us in CallTrackingMetrics, I’d say we rely the most on the powerful integration with Google Analytics, as well as the GeoRouting tool.

Our job is to achieve the maximum return on our client’s investment into paid search advertising, so of course we’re heavy users of Google Analytics. Their connection to CallTrackingMetrics goes both ways, so not only is call data filtered into our Analytics account, but search keywords and click data is ported directly into CallTrackingMetrics. It’s hard to understate how powerful it is to have information from both platforms fully accessible and merged together.

GeoRouting is useful in that it can automatically route callers to the best location. Many of our clients run franchises, so it’s incredibly useful for their incoming calls to be routed to the closest location. That helps them and their clients skip that dreaded middle step – when you call a business, only to wait on hold while their agent redirects you. It also enables our clients to offer a centralized toll-free or vanity number while still providing localized service, which is crucial for a multi-unit business who wants a small-town touch.

Anything else you’d like to add?

Adding CallTrackingMetrics to our toolkit has not only transformed our business, but we’ve also enjoyed an overall increase in ROI. In fact, since we began utilizing CallTrackingMetrics in 2013, our customer retention has risen by 70 percent.

It’s amazing what data can do – not only are we able to hone our strategy and spend time working on the ads that really work, but we can also improve our engagements with clients by monitoring conversation quality and intelligently routing their calls. Our clients enjoy the benefits of your platform, too; once we integrate call tracking into our client’s marketing campaigns, they can generally expect to see conversions increase by 25 to 30 percent.

Let me end with this: I often tell our clients that marketing without call tracking isn’t much different than gambling. If you don’t know what works and what doesn’t, achieving sustainable success in marketing is highly unlikely.

Black Propeller is an industry-leading digital agency specializing in PPC advertising based in Baltimore, MD. It was founded in 2011, and since then has grown to manage more than $1,000,000 in PPC advertising annually. As a Google Partner All-Star Agency and an Elite Bing SMB Partner, Black Propeller has established themselves as leaders in the PPC industry. They are passionate about helping other businesses dominate their markets with PPC advertising.