But what if you’re working with a client who gets way more phone calls than online conversions? Businesses like plumbers, roadside assistance, healthcare, emergency services, construction, and locksmiths all have prospects who would rather click to call. A lot of their customers can’t be bothered to “sign up for a free consultation”—after all, they might be up to their ankles in toilet water.

Take, for example, a personal injury law firm like Geoff McDonald & Associates. When injured people are searching for an attorney, they need to speak with somebody straight away. They might be on-site after a workplace injury, at the hospital, or on the side of the road following a car accident. This is an emergency situation—they’re not going to take the time to fill out a form and just hope that somebody follows up with them. They need help now.

Visitors Want to Convert on Their Terms. Not Yours.

In any industry, there will always be leads who prefer to pick up the phone and call a business directly. And if you’re not taking these leads into account when you track conversions on your landing pages, then you run the risk of optimizing based on an incomplete picture. This is especially important for marketing agencies, because if you’re not tracking calls as conversions then your clients will be completely in the dark on the true ROI you’re driving for them.

When Geoff McDonald & Associates brought on Workshop Digital as their agency, the team identified this exact problem. They were getting a ton of phone calls, but they couldn’t attribute them back to specific landing pages. Here’s how they took immediate steps to track all the visitors who were converting:

• Workshop Digital set up 20 rotating phone numbers to feature on their landing pages using CallRail. CallRail is an awesome service that provides both call tracking and form tracking for data-driven marketers. These trackable numbers helped Workshop Digital attribute where phone calls were coming from (and how well each landing page was really converting).
• They used this new call-tracking data to inform their A/B Testing, helping them to optimize their pages. This helped drive 33% more leads on organic channels, year-over-year.
• On paid and remarketing channels, the results were even better. The agency was able to drive a whopping 219% more leads, year-over-year, thanks to the one-two combo of Unbounce and CallRail.

To get the full story, we spoke with Andrew Miller, Co-Founder of the agency that made it all happen. In this post, we’ll cover exactly how Andrew and his team used call tracking to achieve these award-winning results, and how you can replicate their success at your agency, too.

The Challenge: Tracking Phone Calls Like Clicks

When Geoff McDonald & Associates first reached out to Workshop Digital, they were looking for an opportunity to shake things up with their digital marketing. At the time, the law firm was working with an agency that was directing all of their paid traffic towards a single, low-converting location: their website homepage. As Andrew, the co-founder of the agency, notes:

[The law firm] wasn’t getting the level of detail and reporting that they wanted … the strategies weren’t evolving. It was just what they’d always done, and how they’d always done it. They came to us looking for something fresh.

When they signed on with Workshop Digital, Andrew’s team began redirecting all that juicy paid traffic towards custom, targeted landing pages built in Unbounce. Working closely with the law firm, the team set up multiple variants to strategically target high-converting keywords and locations. 

Each page included a simple form for visitors to convert, as well as a phone number that potential clients could call if they needed immediate assistance.

But that’s when they discovered a problem: only a small margin of the new clients coming in from the landing pages were actually filling out the forms. Visitors had very specific and time-sensitive questions about their potential cases, and the majority of them were choosing the click-to-call option—especially on mobile devices.

So while it was great news that the landing pages were bringing in new clients, this made it difficult for Andrew and his team to figure out which landing pages were actually inspiring visitors to pick up the phone. Even worse, it made the A/B Testing process much slower—several months slower, in some cases—because they were missing out on so much valuable data.

We saw a ton of leads coming in as phone calls. So if we were only relying on email submissions as conversions, we’d be basing our decisions on less accurate, less complete data. And we’re likely to make misinformed decisions that could just be totally wrong for the client.

For the team at Workshop Digital to start A/B Testing and optimizing with reliable and accurate data, Andrew first needed to set up call tracking so they could attribute which landing pages were responsible for driving the calls.

The Solution: Building Landing Pages with Dynamic Phone Numbers

Turns out, there’s an easy way for agencies to track phone calls: CallRail. This handy piece of software integrates seamlessly with Unbounce, so you can make sure every phone number you use on your landing pages is connected, tracked, and counting towards your conversion rates.

The implementation only takes a few minutes. It’s a matter of taking the tracking script from CallRail and adding it as a custom script in Unbounce. Then, the information is married in the back end … and when a phone call occurs it gets pushed into Unbounce as a conversion.

Using the dynamic keywords pool in CallRail, the agency was able to set up 20 different phone numbers for Geoff McDonald & Associates. Each number would automatically rotate to track individual visitors to make call tracking possible—even if they left a landing page and came back to it later, or visited another page to contact the law firm.

We rented a pool of phone numbers. And those numbers rotated through [the CallRail] system so we could see which particular search terms and landing pages were driving those phone calls.

By placing a bit of custom code around each phone number, Workshop Digital was also able to “follow” each visitor as they interacted with the law firm, and push new phone leads directly into the client CRM. 

This is super helpful because it automates the process. We now know which variant of a page a phone call originated from, and we can then use that additional data to speed up our A/B Testing.

But what about phone calls that came in late at night or on weekends? Usually, Geoff McDonald & Associates partnered with an after-hours call service to answer these calls when their team wasn’t in the office. 

To account for these leads, Andrew had another trick up his sleeve…

We built a script that, depending on the time of day, would funnel the lead to the appropriate inbox or appropriate phone number. Meaning if [the call] came in after business hours, the phone number gets automatically routed to an after-hours call service that will call that person back immediately. It’s all time-based so we don’t lose that call.

The Results: Tracking 75% More Conversions on Client Landing Pages

Once the call tracking was up and running, Andrew and his team made a shocking discovery. Over 75% of visitors were converting over the phone, versus using the forms on their landing pages. That was a huge number of leads that they just hadn’t been able to track or attribute back to their highly-successful landing pages previously.

With Unbounce and CallRail together, we get faster and more accurate results for our clients because we’re taking into account all the conversions that take place on a landing page—not just the form submissions.

Now, the agency had a much more complete set of data to A/B Test these landing pages and bring them to their full potential.

Our goal was to increase leads by 25%, year-over-year. But we ended up driving 33% more leads from organic channels, and 219% more leads from our paid and remarketing channels.

The results have far exceeded the expectations of Geoff McDonald & Associates. Last year, the law firm was awarded the M&L Silver Award for “Best Overall Digital Marketing,” thanks in large part to the work done by Workshop Digital.

He’s absolutely thrilled. [Geoff] took these results to one of his legal marketing conferences and won an award for the work. So he gets to be an industry leader in his field.

We’re honored to receive the 2018 M&L Silver Award for Best Overall Digital Marketing! Thanks for a great conference! pic.twitter.com/QuebqiaAgR

— McDonald Injury Law (@McDonaldInjury) January 23, 2019

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For the team at Workshop Digital, CallRail has helped to empower them with more data and transparency. Andrew says that now more than ever, these are the types of innovative strategies that clients—and visitors—are looking for.

We need to get the complete picture of how people arrive, experience, and interact with a landing page. Visitors need the option to convert on their terms—not on ours. As marketers, I think we have to really understand where consumer expectations are going. It’s all about convenience.

Now, It’s Time for You to Answer the Call

Get all the nitty-gritty details on how to set up call tracking for your clients, including a custom script you can use to redirect visitor calls based on time of day or location.

You can take the same approach as Andrew at your agency to track more conversions for your clients and get them better results. Save your spot today for the free CallRail webinar on July 31st, 2019.

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