The Why and How of Tracking Calls from Your Google My Business Listing

Call tracking lets you personalise your customer experience and derive insights from customer calls. Here’s how call tracking can help your business.

The Google search engine has revolutionised the way we approach businesses. If a customer requires a product or service, they will most likely search for the business on Google.

The most common actions after viewing a business online are visiting the website, requesting directions, or calling the business. Did you know that about 70% of mobile search users used ‘click to call’ directly from the search results? Having the right GMB contact number ensures that customers can use this ‘call’ option to reach your business.

Hence, Google My Business (GMB) is a critical channel for your customers to contact or visit your business. Running analysis only through Google will not give you detailed insights on different parameters (including the calls made from the website, customers who have made multiple calls, or cases where your business may have to call back the customer to provide information).

This is where the importance of call tracking comes in. It takes your marketing efforts further by providing more insights, engaging customers better and providing the source of the call, be it the GMB profile or the website.

But how do you ensure that your business is properly tracking calls from google listings or getting the right insights? Read on to understand all the benefits of having a call tracking number.

Why Should Your Business Track Calls From Google Listings?

Tracking calls from Google listing provides valuable insights, as ‘click to call’ is how most customers approach your business in Google search. Here are some benefits of optimising your GMB profile with a call tracking number:

1. Know the Quality of Your Leads

Using the call tracking number can provide your team with valuable data and insights. Information such as who the caller is, whether they came from the website or the GMB listing, any history with the business, previous calls and so on. This helps your business provide a personalised approach to the customer and enhance their experience with you.

Due to the information provided by the call tracking software before picking up the call, spam calls and other telemarketers can be avoided. This filters out such calls from being counted as customer leads.

2. Establish a Trustworthy, Professional Presence

When it comes to helplines or business phone numbers, prospects refuse to answer calls from an unknown number. Adding a virtual number or your business on Google can resolve this issue. Sharing the right information while contacting the customers can greatly increase their chances of picking up your call.

One of the advantages of working with GMB Optimisation tools such as ProManage is that their services include a virtual number for your business. This makes call source tracking easy by giving a verified caller ID and a customer database for performance analysis. Using virtual numbers for your business can centralise customer support or redirect to the local store support that the customer may be asking for.

In addition, we recommend you to maintain consistency with your Name, address, and phone number (NAP). Keeping this data accurate and relevant is crucial as the search algorithm favours consistency and relevancy.

3. Gather Metrics Beyond Google Insights

Your business’s GMB profile comes with an insights section. But this misses out on information such as call tracking, history, leads from calls, source of the call and so on. It is a report from limited information, which may not be sufficient. The insights report calculates calls only made from mobile phones and includes dropped calls in the total call volume.

Call tracking improves the accuracy of calculating the return on investment for local campaigns and provides insights into the source of leads.

4. Assess the Quality of Calls

By tracking calls from google listing, businesses can even record their calls with customers and assess the quality of the conversation and information shared. This can provide better insights on what the customer is looking for, common requests if any information is missing, etc. Assessing calls can help your business be prepared with the right amount of staff on hand to respond to customer queries.

How Can You Track Calls in Your GMB Listing?

Setting up call tracking for your GMB profile is a relatively easy process. Here’s how a basic call tracking set-up works;

1. Navigate to the Info Section of the GMB Listing

In the GMB dashboard, locate the ‘info’ tab on the left menu, and click on it to view your business information, such as your phone number. Google allows you to add a primary and an additional phone number. In the primary phone number, the current number for your business location must already be present. The option to add an additional phone number should be beneath the primary phone number.

2. Retrieve Your Call Tracking Number

This is where your call tracking number comes in. The call tracking number can be obtained from a call tracking software or by using a virtual number for your business. Usually, updating any information on your GMB dashboard requires a postal verification from your business that lasts as long as a week. As one of Google’s 80 official partners, ProManage can reduce this hassle. This means that any changes to the GMB dashboard done via ProManage result in instantaneous changes with no re-verification process.

3. Update the Primary and Additional Phone Numbers

Select the pencil option next to your phone number and input the call tracking number as the primary number. Your local contact number will then be updated as the additional phone number. This is done so that the algorithm can co-relate the additional phone number with the number mentioned on the listing and the website. This ensures that there are no problems with maintaining NAP consistency.

Why It Is Important to Track Your Leads From GMB and How Call Tracking Helps

Call tracking is another method of tracking your website or GMB leads and assessing the performance of each. Tracking calls from Google Listing goes beyond just acquiring insights and involves better customer service, chances of customer retention, and loyalty to the business. Call tracking is one way to optimise your GMB profile to leverage the benefits of a GMB listing.

Analyse, streamline and optimise your hyperlocal marketing with a quick chat. Our experts at ProManage can help you optimise your GMB profile and convert these efforts into actionable insights! Request a demo today or reach out to Kranti.Kumar@Promanage.biz.