Call Tracking: How to bridge the tracking chasm between on and offline campaigns

The modern online marketing world feeds this behavior and encourages many decision makers to do the right thing: transaction data, login activities or shopping cart contents, all this information provides enough knowledge to optimize campaigns precisely for almost any target group and thus significantly increase the conversion rate. In conjunction with customer data stored in the company’s CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system, the insights gained can even lead to far-reaching personalization, not only of the actual advertising measures, but also of the dialog marketing route – via which channel do I address which customer at which time. All well and good. But what happens when the consumer prefers a touchpoint that can’t be tracked via clicks? Generations of marketers have already faced this problem when it comes to making the efficiency of their offline campaigns digitally visible – OOH, flyer or print campaigns.

On the digital trek from touchpoint to touchpoint, there are many difficult passages that must be mastered. Especially when it comes to bridging the tracking chasm between offline and online. Of course, the digital sphere also offers one or two tools for this: e.g. QR codes or URLs printed on posters and ads in magazines. These are all tried-and-tested means of determining the advertising impact digitally, transferring analog campaigns into the world of clicks and making them measurable for analytics tools.

However, this only works as long as the customer uses these applications. If the he prefers to use the telephone instead of these digital tools, the tracking tour comes to an abrupt end. In these cases, concrete measurement of campaign success remains invisible, even if it might be significant and could lead to better marketing decisions. The chasm between the physical and digital worlds then seems unbridgeable.

The solution – or, to stay with the metaphor, the bridge – is: static Call Tracking.
This innovative technology seamlessly connects all kinds of offline campaigns to the most common tracking and analytics tools, making them tangible – whether poster, flyer or ad.

Here’s how it works: Instead of tagging their OOH ads with a digital tracker (such as a web address), advertisers print a campaign-specific, (digital) phone number on their media product. Calls generated via these measures are then transferred directly to the analytics tools, marked as conversions and assigned to the campaign. The result: the performance of the respective campaign is precisely evaluated and marketers can then use the insights gained to optimize it in a customer-centric manner. Ultimately, this leads to greater efficiency.

With this method, it is also possible to determine more than just campaign-based performance. If, for example, several phone numbers are used within a specific offline campaign, it is even possible to evaluate success based on various other factors – such as poster location, ads in specific magazines or motif variants. In this way, the database that marketers can then use to improve and adapt their campaigns is broadened, and the added value of call tracking systems is increased even further.