As someone who’s main focus in their career is to change peoples’ lives by helping them to hear, terms like “digital attribution” and “call tracking” may not be in the forefront of your mind as an audiologist or other hearing professional at work. Yet, as a business owner or manager, these are important things to know for your practice’s success.
You spend marketing dollars to acquire patients, so it is vital to know and understand how to use those dollars most effectively to benefit your practice and ensure you aren’t just throwing away money that could be used to help additional patients.
How do you make sure that you are marketing most effectively? Well, you need to make data-driven decisions. And how do you obtain data to do this?
That’s right – digital attribution and call tracking.
Online vs. Offline Marketing
There are two main places where all of your marketing takes place – either online, or offline.
Think of some of the places where you are currently advertising, and you will see that they must fall into one of these categories:
| Online | Offline |
| Website | Direct Mail |
| Newspaper | |
| Third-Party Web pages | Phonebook |
| Pay-Per-Click | Billboard |
| Banner Ads | TV/Radio |
Just like these ads differ in their medium, so must the way that you can most successfully and accurately track and measure their success.
How do you most accurately track the success of both types of marketing campaigns? Again, this is where our key terms come in.
| Online | Offline |
| Digital Attribution & Call Tracking | Call Tracking |
Online Marketing
To see your consumers’ complete patient journey, you will need both digital attribution and call tracking in place on your online advertisements. Let’s look at an example.
- Potential patient googles “hearing aids in Los Angeles”
- They see a few practices come up in their google search and click on your website
- They browse your website for a bit and then continue to look at some of your competitors
- Potential patient comes back to your website and clicks around on a few web pages
- They click on the phone number on your page and call into your office to schedule an appointment
Here, the consumer started their journey online – that’s where the digital attribution will come into place. You should be able to see how they came upon your website, and what happened once on your website. Then, when they call into your office (through a tracking number on the website), you can allocate which number they called and that it came from your website, too.
By using dynamic number insertion (DNI), you can seamlessly tie in the consumer’s online interactions to their call for complete end-to-end , online to offline (O2O) attribution.
Offline Marketing
Tracking your offline marketing cannot get quite as fine-tune as you can get with online marketing since it is only possible to truly and accurately know what ad it was that drove them to call in finally.
For example, a patient can call in the office and tell you that they think they got your phone number from the newspaper – but with call tracking numbers in place, you can accurately assess which number they called you from (which may be a direct mail piece). Call tracking ensures that the final marketing attribution receives credit for driving the consumer to call your office to set an appointment.
If you were to only go off of what the caller tells your front office staff, you can run into errors of the person remembering incorrectly, or even risk not knowing at all if your phone handler forgets to ask the caller how they heard about you.
Not ready to start utilizing call tracking? Find out a DIY approach for marketing attribution!
You may have noticed that call tracking can and should be used in both online I offline marketing advertisements. Why is that? How may the type of phone numbers used differ in the two mediums? That brings us to our next topic.
Call Tracking Numbers vs. Dynamic Number Insertion (DNI)
You have probably heard of call tracking and are familiar with how it works – and perhaps you’ve heard of DNI with no clue what it means. Let’s explain the two.
Call tracking numbers are local or toll-free numbers used in place of regular telephone numbers to track and record inbound calls. Call tracking requires that you use separate tracking numbers on all of your different marketing pieces to attribute where your calls are coming from. The caller dials the tracking number, and then reaches the designated target number which is its destination (most likely your main office telephone number). Tracking numbers can be used in both online and offline advertisements.
Dynamic Number Insertion, most commonly referred to as simply DNI, uses a code placed on a website which allows the phone number on the page to change based on the keywords and actions taken in the web search. A URL is created for each specific number/keyword and sent to the web developer for implementation. DNI can use either local or toll-free numbers without issue. With DNI, you can more effectively track web traffic by breaking down searches to the referral site and keyword level. This is so online interactions to be tied to offline attribution.
It is evident that call tracking can be used in both online and offline advertisements, though DNI is prohibited to strictly online ads.
When to use should you use static call tracking numbers online, and when should you use DNI?
As noted above, DNI requires a code to be placed on the website you will be swapping out numbers with. Since this is necessary, it is difficult to use DNI in some online advertisements or places where you may market, since you do not have control of inserting this code. For example, a DNI number would not be something you could place on your Facebook page. In those cases, using regular call tracking numbers will suffice.
Discover how to place call tracking numbers on 7 of the most popular listing services here.
How Does This Improve My Practice?
There is no way to improve and fine-tune your marketing efforts without receiving the correct data to do so. Without tracking your marketing, you will not receive data.
This is why CallSource offers solutions using tracking numbers, DNI, or a combination – so you can correctly attribute all of your marketing sources both online and offline and make better-informed decisions on where and how to advertise in the future.
If you’re ready to talk to someone about improving your practice, we can have someone reach out to you, or you can contact a representative today at 888.788.0123 to learn more.
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I want to talk to someone about utilizing call tracking and DNI at my practice.
