What is call tracking?

The static version is simple. One number per advert, per flyer, per vehicle, and calls sort themselves.

The web version swaps the number on the page depending on how the visitor arrived, which lets a single page report several sources.

Both break in the same place: the caller who saw one thing and dialed from another. A person who reads a billboard and then searches for you is recorded as search.

It still beats asking. Self-reported attribution is guesswork, and people genuinely do not remember where they first saw a business.

Say a garage door company mails 5,000 postcards in April for $2,400, printed with a tracking number used nowhere else. Over the next six weeks that number receives 31 calls.

Thirty-one calls for $2,400 is $77 a call, which sounds poor. Transcripts sort them further. Four were wrong numbers or sales pitches, eighteen asked for a quote, and nine booked a job. That makes it $267 per booked job, against an average ticket of $780.

The same month, a radio sponsorship with its own number cost $1,500 and produced 6 calls and 1 job. Without separate numbers, both would have shown up as a busier phone in April, and the owner would have renewed both or cut both. With them, the decision takes about a minute.

Who owns the numbers? If the vendor holds them and you leave, the number on 5,000 postcards goes dead. Ask whether you can port tracking numbers out, and get the answer in writing.

How long should a number stay live after the campaign? Longer than you think. Postcards sit on fridges, and magnets stay there for years. Keep a print number running for at least a year, and when you retire it, forward it to your main line for a while.

What happened on the number before you got it? Recycled numbers bring old callers with them, and those calls inflate your count. A good vendor rests numbers before reissuing them. Check the first week's calls by hand either way.

Does the vendor record calls by default? If so, telling callers is your job as the business. Recording rules vary by state, so turn recording on deliberately, with a spoken notice, and not because it was the default setting.

Forward a tracking number to GreetKeeper and it gets answered like any other.

The transcript adds something a number cannot. A caller who mentions the advert by name gives you attribution the routing could never infer.

Each number can have its own hours, greeting and calendar under one account, so a campaign line can open differently from your main one.