Automotive Call Tracking: Is It a Necessity or a Luxury?

Recently, I took the plunge and purchased my very first car. People kept telling me that this milestone would be a game-changer in my life. Initially, I thought they meant it in terms of all the exciting road trips, holidays, and late-night drives I would have. However, as I began my search for the perfect car just a week after getting my license, I quickly realized that I had absolutely no clue about cars.

I was clueless about what specifications to look for, the hidden costs involved, the wide range of car models available, or even where to begin my search. So, I embarked on a research journey. I called countless dealerships, bombarding them with questions about pricing, additional information, vehicle availability, scheduling appointments, and post-purchase services. I started off as a complete newbie, but by the end of the month, I could have given you a crash course on how to purchase your first car.

When I finally made my purchase, it hit me that a first car is not just significant because of the memorable road trips, but also because of the entire process of learning, researching and collecting info which leads to investing in new experiences by actually buying the car. That’s what truly makes owning a new car so special.

Being a marketer in the world of Call Tracking, I couldn’t help but reflect my own car-buying journey (the ultimate conversion) on our clients marketing strategies in automotive industry. It dawned on me just how much valuable information marketers could extract from phone calls like mine, using them as vital clues to optimize their marketing efforts. It’s truly fascinating to see the depth of insights that can be gleaned from those conversations.

So, Call Tracking in Automotive Industry, a good-to-have or a must-have?

Organic search generates the most leads in the automotive industry at 38.7%, followed by direct at 27.5%, paid at 23.3%, and referral at 8.8% (source: webinarcare)

About 63% of car buyers identified their new vehicles on social media (source: Goodway Group)

Over 75% of auto shoppers say that online video has influenced their shopping habits or purchases. (source: Think with Google)

84% of marketers report phone calls having higher conversion rates with larger order value compared to other forms of engagement (source: v12data)

61% of new and used vehicle shoppers contact the dealership by calling after a search.(source: v12data)

57% of consumers call about vehicles from a search ad call extension to schedule an appointment.(source: v12data)

Enhance your company’s local presence by leveraging call tracking with local phone numbers that seamlessly forward calls to your main line. Local call tracking numbers, equipped with area codes specific to regions or cities, allow businesses to track calls from targeted areas, making potential leads feel more at ease when reaching out. Even if your business is physically located in a different state or city, it’s crucial to create a sense of proximity and connection with your prospects and customers. Whether you’re running location-specific campaigns or listed in local directories, displaying a phone number with a local prefix, you can unlock the following:

1. Establish the desired local presence for your company.
2. Improve the precision of your marketing efforts by targeting specific geographic areas.
3. Utilize local phone numbers across offline sources such as newspaper advertisements, billboards, radio commercials, and other marketing channels that are tailored to specific locations.
4. Position your business effectively on both local and national scales by offering the flexibility of toll-free and local phone numbers (you can also conduct A/B testing to determine the most effective option).
5. Allocate your marketing budget wisely based on the channels that generate the highest number of phone calls, ensuring optimal returns on your investment.

As the marketing landscape becomes increasingly complex, with a multitude of channels and touchpoints, attribution becomes even more critical in providing a comprehensive view of the customer journey and driving data-informed decision-making. In this ever-evolving buying journey, which often starts with a simple search, it’s difficult to predict the ultimate outcome. With a myriad of channels and mediums for prospects to engage with, it’s easy to lose important touchpoints that your users make. However, offline conversion tracking (oct) help you bridge the gap between offline and online interactions, enabling you to connect the dots in your attribution tracking.

For instance, if a customer first interacts with your brand through a paid search ad, visits your website, and then calls to make a purchase, call tracking helps you recognize the importance of the paid search channel as an initial touchpoint. This information helps optimize your marketing budget by focusing on channels that drive valuable interactions.

By implementing call tracking, businesses can effectively unveil and measure offline conversions, gaining a comprehensive view of the customer journey. This is especially beneficial in industries like automotive, where multiple touchpoints exist between initial contact, prospecting, and final sale. Leveraging these touchpoints as conversion goals provides valuable insights that can be used to optimize ad campaigns, allowing for data-driven decision-making. It ensures that no touchpoint goes unnoticed and helps businesses make the most of their advertising investments.

Ok, Call Tracking can automate your Call Conversion Tracking process, but did you know that you can send only your legit leads avoiding the distractions caused by blurry data?

Having clean, reliable data may sound like a common requirement, but it’s actually rarer than you might think. That’s why we’ve developed a special feature called integration triggers, which enables our users to send only genuine phone leads (aka answered calls) or even better, classify phone leads based on specific criteria and send only those that meet certain requirements to platforms like Google Analytics 4, HubSpot, or any other integration. For example, you can set it up to send phone leads with a call duration of more than X minutes.

By ensuring your data is clean and accurate, you can greatly enhance your marketing productivity. You’ll have clear, comprehensive data at your disposal, allowing you to make informed decisions about where to allocate your budget and which marketing efforts are truly effective. In fact, companies that have a clean marketing view ready for data backed decisions are 23 times more likely to acquire customers, six times more likely to retain customers, and 19 times more likely to be profitable as a result (source: Help Scout).

Integrating call tracking with your CRM enhances lead generation, lead management, lead source accuracy, eliminating uncertainty around offline or direct leads. This data-driven approach enables mapping the entire customer journey and optimized marketing strategies.

Here are the top 3 ways Call Tracking can help your CRM:

↪️ Generate Leads: The majority of lead capturing processes primarily focus on gathering lead information through form submissions, which is acceptable. However, disregarding phone leads means you are neglecting valuable prospects. Why? Well, leads tend to contact your business by phone when they are prepared to make a purchase, indicating they have progressed beyond the informational and commercial stages. By integrating CRM systems, you can create new contacts when a first-time caller, who is not in your database, makes a phone call, or update existing contacts to enhance your lead data.

↪️ Get accurate lead sources: Integrating call tracking with your CRM can enhance the accuracy of lead source identification. By leveraging this data, your CRM gains the capability to accurately assign leads to their appropriate sources, effectively eliminating the uncertainty that typically surrounds offline or direct leads. This newfound clarity empowers you to make data-driven decisions and fine-tune your marketing strategies accordingly. With a deeper understanding of how various channels contribute to lead generation, you can optimize your efforts, map more accurately the customer journey and maximize your results.

↪️ Enrich Lead Data for precise lead scoring: To effectively nurture your leads, it is crucial to have comprehensive knowledge of every touchpoint, enabling you to accurately score your leads and generate more high-quality leads. Nimbata enhances your CRM by providing additional lead data, capturing call activities, and feeding them back into your CRM. This ultimately assists you in establishing data-driven criteria for scoring, based on both the lead’s online and offline behaviors.

Eliminate lost sales – Picture the most common worst-case scenario: losing potential customers ready to make a purchase because you missed their phone calls. Being notified when you miss a call through email or Slack, lets you act on time and you can promptly respond to missed calls, minimizing the risk of losing a valuable customer or encouraging your leads to choose a competitor.

Phone calls matter, but measuring their impact on sales is very challenging if you don’t use the right attribution tool. In fact, this was the greatest pain point for our client, who turned to Nimbata seeking a trusted call tracking software to measure the actual number of phone leads they received, and even more, to understand which were the marketing channels generating them. Afterward, they had to find ways to drive more calls from those marketing sources that provenly convert to appointments and sales.

Moving a step further, they needed to test which of their 3rd party marketplaces worked best bringing referrals to the business. Lastly, the client was seeking a way to reduce non-sales calls (e.g. support questions and requests) from their marketing campaigns. Knowing the call volume of those non-qualified calls, the client could limit the operational costs by updating their website with relevant information.

How did we help our client overcome their business challenges? First off, since the company had at that time been advertised in more than 10 online marketing channels at a national level, they needed a pool of local tracking numbers to be assigned per source. The next step was to deploy Dynamic Number Insertion Technology (DNI) to dynamically swap tracking numbers on the website and reveal the channels that generate phone calls. With the above in place, the client managed to gain significant customer insights at a session level, understanding which channels, campaigns, and keywords generate high quality leads for the business.

By incorporating Nimbata, our client saved time leaving out the guesswork via call conversion tracking automation right from the get-go. Our client quickly quickly saw the benefits: Phone Lead increasement with higher intent to buy, paused those campaigns which resulted in mediocre and poor marketing results, and allocated their budget to campaigns that brought quality leads and sales to the business.

So, to come back to the initial question. Call Tracking is a must-have in the Automotive Industry and the reason is simple. Phone Calls are your most high-intent leads. Imagine that there are prospects out there, they have done their research, they have probably seen many Youtube videos reviewing the car they want, they have already make a pricing comparison comparing your automotive brand with your competitors’. Leaving these leads out of your optimizing efforts means that you probably have many blind spots in your customer journey.