Beware of “Tracking Phone Numbers”.

At Third Marble Marketing, we’ve recently won-over a few new clients that had a difficult time dealing with online advertising companies that use “tracking phone numbers” to track calls for their clients.  A Tracking Phone Number is a different number than your business’s phone number, called a Voice Over IP phone number, that instantly re-directs to your business’s phone number.  Each time someone calls the tracking phone number, the call statistics are recorded so you know how many times the phone number was dialed.  They are intended to show how many calls an online advertising campaign produced.

Third Marble Marketing briefly used tracking phone calls in the past and, based on our client’s experiences with them, we now highly recommend to our clients not to use them.  If your current online advertising company is using tracking phone numbers to “prove your marketing ROI”, we recommend you use extreme caution when interpreting the results you get.

As with any industry, there are always a few companies out to make a quick buck.  Based on a few horror stories from several small business owners we’ve talked to, there are some online advertising companies that use these tracking phone numbers to “over-value” their advertising services to the unsuspecting small business owner.

Here are a few things you should look-out for:

Basically, if you get 100 phone calls from a tracking phone number, just beware that only a fraction of them are probably incremental calls from actual new prospective customers.

We must add, however, that there are many reputable online advertising companies that can very effectively interpret the results from these phone numbers.  The above advice is simply meant to be a list of things to look for when using tracking phone numbers.

In the end, it’s all about making more money.  If you begin an online advertising program and your business increases, then you are getting good results from your advertising.  However, if your business does not improve, and your reports are showing 100 phone calls, your monthly advertising expenses just increased by $1000 and your original phone number is getting fewer calls, you may want to carefully review the performance of your online advertising company.

As a policy, Third Marble Marketing does not use tracking phone numbers.  In our opinion, the results are difficult to interpret at best and they are an added expense that we would pass along to you, that we feel will not provide any added-value to your business.

We prefer to keep online advertising easy, effective and affordable.  After all, how hard is it to ask a new customer “How did you hear about us?”

I hope this helps.

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