What Is Dynamic Number Insertion?

Dynamic number insertion (DNI) is a call tracking technology that automatically displays a unique phone number to each website visitor based on their marketing source, such as a Google Ads campaign, keyword, referral channel, or webpage. This enables businesses to accurately attribute inbound phone calls to specific marketing efforts.

By connecting call data directly to CRM platforms such as Salesforce, dynamic number insertion allows revenue teams to measure which campaigns generate leads, pipeline, and revenue from phone conversations.

This improves marketing attribution, budget optimization, and sales visibility.

How dynamic number insertion works

Marketers often use DNI on local ad campaigns to ensure that prospects in certain cities or regions are presented a local phone number.

Imagine that you have a business that sells travel packages, and you advertise those packages on Google AdWords. So long as prospects clicking your ad fill out a web form, you have complete visibility into ad conversion metrics. But many people follow a web search with a phone call. The moment they call your standard office phone, you lose all visibility into conversion metrics.

This is how most businesses operate, yet it’s painfully ineffective. The phone is no longer just something that facilitates voice or text communications – it’s now a data-driven technology that can inform the decisions you make while running your business.

The moment prospects call, all the resources you put into AdWords campaigns, content marketing and social media go right down the drain since you can’t associate your efforts with results.

Here’s where dynamic number insertion comes in. With DNI, every time a customer reaches your website, prospects automatically see a phone number that’s unique to the channel, campaign or keyword that led them to your site. If this happened on your site, wouldn’t it be easier to decide where to spend your marketing budget if you always knew which content and keywords were driving the best calls?

How dynamic number insertion works technically

Dynamic number insertion works using JavaScript, cookies, and call tracking numbers.

The process includes:

• A visitor clicks a marketing link from an ad, campaign, or referral source
• A tracking script stores attribution data in the visitor’s browser
• The script dynamically replaces the website phone number with a unique tracking number
• When the visitor calls, attribution data is captured
• Call activity is automatically logged in Salesforce or another CRM

This helps you rank for technical queries and builds EEAT.

Who should use dynamic number insertion

Dynamic number insertion is valuable for any organization that generates leads, appointments, or revenue through inbound phone calls.

It is commonly used by:

• B2B companies with inbound and outbound sales teams

• Service organizations such as healthcare, legal, and home services

• Companies running paid search, paid social, and digital advertising campaigns

• Organizations with call centers or inside sales teams

• Salesforce-centric revenue teams that require accurate attribution

Any business that relies on inbound phone conversations can benefit from dynamic number insertion.

Displaying Local Phone Numbers

Beyond getting tracking metrics, another reason to use DNI is to present a local phone number to certain customers. In many industries, the presence of a local phone number can increase the odds that a prospect calls you right away. This is especially true in certain service industries, such as law or healthcare.

For example, imagine that you have offices in San Francisco, New York and Austin. You probably already have unique ad campaigns or ad groups associated with these areas. Displaying a local phone number to these prospects is as simple as associating a Revenue.io number with each ad group or campaign. This way, prospects arriving at your site after clicking a Google ad from Austin will be presented a local phone number.

How Revenue.io’s DNI Works

Revenue.io was conceived by marketers who know how valuable DNI technology is, but wanted to make it as easy as possible to set up so that marketers could focus on the impact of calls on ROI. Here’s how our DNI works:

1. Use our tracking wizards to instantly provision unique phone numbers for any marketing channel.
2. Add a snippet of Revenue.io javascript to every page on your site that contains a phone number. Very often, this is a one-time global code insertion.
3. When leads click through to your site from a social media post, paid search keyword, specific URL, or any other online effort, they’re assigned a third-party cookie that keeps track of their referral source.
4. As soon as customers reach your site, they’ll automatically see the unique number you associated with that the ad or keyword that referred them.

The Benefits of DNI

Optimize Your Budget in Real Time

Anyone who has ever been tasked to manage their business’ or a client’s paid search budget knows how important it is to have up-to-the-moment insight into which keywords are offering the best returns. Without phone call tracking, it can often be next-to-impossible to know how paid search is impacting phone-based revenue.

Provision Local and Toll Free Numbers

DNI technology also gives you the ability to dynamically replace your site’s numbers with a local number. This can be helpful for national businesses that want to establish a local presence, such as national real estate or travel agencies. In our post on A/B testing phone numbers on landing pages, we discuss the benefits of using DNI to serve up local numbers based on geotargeting variables in AdWords. To keep these numbers when switching platforms, you will use phone number porting.

Report Social Media ROI

Social media managers often have to settle for reporting growth metrics based on likes and follows rather than the revenue driven by their efforts. But DNI allows social marketers to provision phone numbers associated with social content. The result is that businesses can finally see how social is impacting their bottom line.

Track Channels, Campaigns and Keywords

One of the best things about DNI is that it gives marketers the flexibility to track calls with different levels of granularity. For example, you can quickly see how a specific channel like Twitter impacts leads, opportunities and revenue closed over the phone. If you want to delve deeper, you can also track at the campaign or even keyword level.

Since discovering call tracking, I no longer struggle to prove that my efforts are beneficial. I can see, in real time, which ads are working and which aren’t. And I can, as a result, invest more in the efforts that drive the best returns.