Call Tracking Metrics: 15 KPIs That Matter

As someone who was on the agency side for several years, I’ve had the pleasure of introducing several customers to call tracking. These programs were often ratcheted up in increasing stages of complexity, giving each client only the data that was truly actionable. It should be noted that the following basic metrics are usually only enough for startups or small businesses that don’t already have a strong ROI culture.

#1 – Numbers of Sales Calls from a Website or Websites Within a Network: 

This metric is useful when a company is operating a network of sites, and needs to see which sites are driving the most sales calls. Even such a basic KPI as this can prompt the retention or complete overhaul of a website. I’ve seen call metrics discover sites that were originally thought of as cost centers because of a low number of online leads be proven to be spectacular at driving calls.

#2 – Number of Calls By Channel

If a company is just getting their feet wet in organic search, paid search, event marketing or other channels, it can be useful to start by merely tracking how often those channels are making the phone ring. At the very least, it’s an indicator as to whether investments in those channels and the messaging associated with each are working or not.

#3 – Call Duration

This is a low-budget method of determining the number of spam calls. Ideally, a rep should be giving marketing real-time feedback by labeling call quality within a CRM or smart application. If you don’t have this luxury, then call duration is a crude method for measuring lead quality. For example, some small businesses will arbitrarily determine that any call that lasts less than one minute is not a marketing qualified lead.

Advanced Call Tracking Metrics

Advanced metrics are all about determining which marketing efforts really drive sales. After all, you could be driving a million leads every month and your reps could still not be hitting their sales quotas. To really do a great job driving these metrics, you’re going to need a powerful call tracking tool that integrates seamlessly with your CRM.

#4 – Leads, Opportunities and Revenue per Channel

These are broad KPIs, but when you can actually gain visibility into both online and offline sales through advanced call tracking, the results are incredibly powerful.  To really do this right, you need to quickly provision unique phone numbers for all your marketing channels. This means that each website, business card, eBook and social campaign needs to have a unique phone number. This is a lot easier than it sounds. With services like Revenue.io, you can provision phone numbers instantly and inexpensively and quickly associate them with channel tracking.

#5 – Revenue per Local/Regional/National Campaign

The campaign level is where marketers have the opportunity to get more granular about which regions respond to their message. Imagine that you produce one radio ad, and run it in 50 American cities. The only difference in the ad’s audio message is the phone number at the end of each one, since you have assigned a unique phone number to each market.  When the phones start ringing, you’ll get real-time data with each call, showing you exactly which markets respond to your messaging, and which you need to turn down.

#6 – Keywords Driving Leads, Opportunities and Revenue

This is a powerful metric for enterprise companies with strong inbound and demand gen marketing programs. If your AdWords manager has been getting by just seeing the number of calls from Google, providing insight into specific keywords that drive leads, opportunities and revenue will be life-changing. Don’t be surprised if it takes time for patterns to emerge. Like any testing data, the more resources you expend, the faster you’ll see results.

#7 – Calls and Revenue from A/B Landing Page Tests

If you have a reasonably mature SEM campaign and a little development bandwith to spare, you should be A/B testing different landing pages. For any business where calls are even a small component of the sales strategy, unique tracking numbers should be utilized as a part of your conversion data, right alongside other metrics such as form submissions or sales.  In many industries, calls can drive many times more revenue than online conversions. Given this fact, you’d be wise to track both the number of inbound calls and the subsequent revenue from each as separate KPIs.

#8 – Abandoned Call Rate

Are your reps losing out on valuable phone leads? The best way to find out is by tracking reps’ rate of abandoned calls. A call abandonment rate refers to the percentage of inbound callers that hang up before a rep can answer a call. This is crucial to track because inbound phone leads are often the most valuable leads of all. They’re highly engaged, they’ve usually researched your solution and are ready to have a serious sales conversation. After all, think of the last time you called a business. You probably had a good reason.

Don’t leave these high value leads hanging. If a call abandonment rate is high, it can indicate that you need to hire more reps to cover the phones. It can also indicate that calls are being routed to the wrong place, or that reps are simply failing to answer the phone. Try to make your abandonment rate as close to 0% as possible.

#9 – Number of Conversations (e.g. Average Outbound Call Duration)

What is the average length of time that reps are spending on connected calls? This metric is important because too many short calls can be an early warning sign that a rep needs guidance. If a rep consistently fails to keep prospects on the phone for longer than two minutes (the point at which many sales teams deem “a conversation”), then you may need to listen to that rep’s messaging. By drilling into call recordings you can try to gauge why prospects aren’t staying on calls. Are the leads unqualified, or is that rep failing to engage effectively?

#10 – Average Call Disposition

Revenue.io helps reps log call dispositions automatically

“Call disposition” is a term that stems from call centers referring to the outcome of a call. Some common call dispositions might include busy, no answer, hang-up or appointment set. By tracking these call outcomes in your CRM, you can view a report that gives a bird’s-eye-view of a rep’s call outcomes. This can be valuable because if there is a disproportionate amount of certain call outcomes, it can signal a red flag. As an example, if Marketing is providing Sales with a high number of disconnected numbers, then it could mean that there’s a problem with the lead source.

One way that Revenue.io helps sales teams is by enabling reps to log call dispositions in Salesforce with one click. Our tool even gives reps a gentle reminder when they forget to log dispositions. This not only saves reps time, but ensures that reps log every call outcome.

#11 – Dials to Connection Percentage

The percentage of dials that result in a prospect picking up the phone.

You may have reps on your team that are dialing leads like crazy but not actually connecting with prospects. There may be reps that are dialing less but are simply more efficient at connecting with customers.

Time of day, voicemail skills and a rep’s dialing technology can all play a role in how many dials actually result in prospects picking up the phone.

#12 – Dials to Appointments Ratio

How many conversations result in actual appointments (demos, meetings, etc.)?

Sales organizations that put a lot of emphasis on calls need to know which reps are best at booking meetings and which need work. If you have reps that are connecting with a lot of leads but not booking enough meetings, it’s important to drill down and listen to call recordings in order to identify ways that those reps can improve their pitch.

#13- Dial-to-Opportunity Percentage

How many dials should your team make per day to achieve your opportunity creation goals?

This metric is both predictive and analytical, revealing not only how much effort is needed to create an opportunity, but also how efficient your current team is. Knowing approximately how many dials it takes to create opportunities can help ensure that your team is properly staffed and that reps are keeping busy enough to move leads to the next stage.

#14- Revenue from Calls per Source

Which marketing efforts are driving the most valuable calls?

To make the best marketing investments possible, it’s vital to track revenue from leads that convert online and also revenue from leads that convert over the telephone. This is possible with a call tracking tool that integrates with your customer relationship management (CRM), where your revenue data is stored. A revenue-based call tracking tool can report which channels, campaigns, ad group and even keywords are driving calls that result in the most revenue.

#15 – Voicemail Return Rate

How successful are reps at getting leads to return voicemails?

Getting prospects to return voicemails can be one of the most difficult tasks in outbound sales. Looking at a voicemail return rate can help you identify which reps are leaving the most successful voicemails and which reps need additional coaching. You can also check to see whether coaching initiatives improve reps’ voicemail return rates.