Using Call Tracking to Improve and Grow Your Practice

Call tracking is the process of determining how callers found your business. Call tracking software records information about incoming telephone calls to your practice, sometimes even recording the conversations. Most importantly, these services help you determine where the person calling located the number for your practice–a Google advertisement, social media, your website, etc.

As an orthodontist, you depend on telephone calls to get new patients. If you are trying to grow your practice, call tracking is an important marketing strategy to utilize. It can help you understand how effective your current advertising efforts are, and where to spend your advertising dollars in the future.

Here are some of the benefits of call tracking:

• Connect the number of incoming calls to the effectiveness of an advertising channel.
• Determine the return on investment (ROI) for marketing campaigns.
• Measure the cost of various advertisements.
• Optimize your marketing budget to prioritize the most efficient marketing channels

One of the most popular call tracking software services is called CallRail. CallRail uses a unique phone number for each marketing campaign so you can tell calls from each campaign apart.

Here’s an example of how an orthodontist practice might use CallRail. Suppose the practice Smiles-R-Us in Washington, D.C. wants to launch two marketing campaigns at the same time. One campaign is a Google advertisement and one campaign is a direct mailer. They purchase two unique phone numbers from their call tracking provider so they can track their phone leads.

When a potential patient sees one of these marketing campaigns and calls the number, their call will be forwarded to the main business line at the Smiles-R-Us office. The patient will not be aware this is happening, and Smiles-R-Us will be able to create a report that provides information about what campaign generated this call (Google ads or the direct mailer), in addition to this information about the caller:

• The caller’s name, telephone number, and location from caller ID data
• The source of the call (manually set to “Google Ads” or “Direct Mail Spring 2020”)
• The transcription of the call
• The caller’s timeline. This includes previous calls and texts from this person, tags that describe these interactions, and notes on previous interactions with this customer.

CallRail also offers dynamic number insertion (DNI). DNI is an even more advanced method of call tracking you can utilize by adding a snippet of code to your website installing CallRail’s WordPress plugin if your website uses WordPress. With DNI, every visitor to your website sees a unique phone number. With DNI, every potential patient that calls from an advertisement will be associated in the call log with all of their sessions on Smiles-R-Us’s website. Each visitor is given a unique tracking phone number for their use only. Smiles-R-Us will be able to identify every person who calls and get data about them. The call log will also include landing page parameters, referring sites, the active page during the phone call, and the device and browser service the caller was using.

Call tracking should be a part of your marketing strategy if you want to know what advertisements, emails, and pages are converting the most new patient leads for your business. With call tracking, you can make better decisions about where to focus your time and money to get the most new patients.