Topics Discussed:

• Dynamic Number Insertion website call tracking.
• What is Dynamic Number Insertion (DNI)?
• Website Call Tracking.
• Swapping phone numbers on website.
• Sessionized call tracking.

Links Mentioned in Episode

• Dynamic Number Insertion (DNI) Service

Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Kevin Dieny: Hello, welcome to the Close The Loop podcast. I’m your host, Kevin Dieny and today we’re going to be talking about, What Is DNI? So anytime you’ve ever heard, you know, acronyms, LOL, TTYL, anything like that, DNI is no different. It’s probably like, wow, what does that mean, in this context?

[00:00:20] Kevin Dieny: There’s acronyms for everything these days. So today we’re going to be talking about DNI, as it stands for dynamic number insertion. I’ve also heard it, as DNR, dynamic number replacement. It’s basically online call tracking. So anyone who’s like, well, what is DNI? If they know what call tracking is, and it kinda, you know, makes sense.

[00:00:42] Kevin Dieny: Okay, we’re tracking, we’re doing call tracking, but we’re doing it online, okay. So call tracking, if you don’t know, just to, you know, lay out the basics is not like FBI CIA style, knowing, you know, who’s been calling, tracking, you know, someone’s spouse or boyfriend or girlfriend’s calls.

[00:01:01] Kevin Dieny: We’re not talking about that. We’re also not talking about like mapping the call, is it moves around the country or, you know, moving from landlines to satellites or to internet or anything like, like VOIP. We’re not talking to you about that per se. We are talking specifically about the use of a technology, a tool to track the sources, to track the campaigns, and the marketing that drove phone calls.

[00:01:28] Kevin Dieny: That’s basically it. What’s driving phone calls to my business? What’s driving phone calls to any business? Is it campaigns, marketing? What is it? What’s what’s what’s causing all of that? For businesses that have a lot of phone calls or that rely on a lot of phone calls, right?

[00:01:43] Kevin Dieny: Knowing where calls are coming from is a big deal. So if anything, that can help you uncover, okay, I’m getting a lot of calls. It’s from this campaign I did, or it’s existing patients, or it’s returning customers, or it’s that customer I served, you know, two years ago. It just depends what the business’s needs are.

[00:02:04] Kevin Dieny: If your need is okay, I’m going to run campaigns, I’m going to run marketing, right. And I’m going to be sending money. Well, I want to know if the money I’m spending is working and you know, it’s not always crystal clear, especially with phone calls. I used to work in different marketing capacities at different places.

[00:02:23] Kevin Dieny: At companies, consulting, and agencies here or there. Are lots of gigs like that. And I hadn’t quite, before I came here, I didn’t know all that was all about call tracking. I thought, you know, if you throw a number on the page, the only people that we’re going to call that are the people who wanted support.

[00:02:41] Kevin Dieny: That’s generally what I thought. And I thought the businesses that were getting a lot of phone calls. We’re just tracking calls off the clicks on the website, you know, like someone takes their mouse and hovers it over a phone number and clicks it. That click is trackable. You know, you don’t need call tracking for that.

[00:02:58] Kevin Dieny: That’s link tracking, you know? And so I thought of it like that. I thought a forms as the king, the best, because that’s someone filling out, putting in their information, it’s logging, you know, their browser, their IP it’s maybe cookied them, knows who they are. It’s following them. It knows. Here’s this, whoever’s filling out this form.

[00:03:16] Kevin Dieny: And so when they fill out the form, you have this wonderful picture, right? Here’s a person who filled out this form, here’s that conversion. And here’s all the data and information that they filled out. Here’s anything, everything else we have about them, right?

[00:03:28] Kevin Dieny: They come from an email, it’s all there and it was all very clear. So anything that wasn’t clear as a marketer, it’s like, man, If I don’t know, I’m going to have a hard time explaining this, you know, to get credit for it. I’m going to have a hard time proving that this came from marketing. If you’re doing consulting or an agency work, it’s like, I’m going to have a hard time proving that this came from me. That this is the lead gen that I’ve provided.

[00:03:53] Kevin Dieny: I think some business owners are like, I don’t really need it that specifically. I just generally know, you know, I’m going up, I’m going down. So that’s, you know, there’s different capacities and needs for things like this. But at the end of the day, if you really want to grow, you have to look a little more.

[00:04:08] Kevin Dieny: You have to look at it as a little more granularity than just, you know, directionally things are going up or directionally things are going down. So that’s what we’re gonna be talking about specifically with phone calls. So how are we tracking phone calls? Well, there’s two ways. There’s what we here call static call tracking and dynamic or online call tracking.

[00:04:28] Kevin Dieny: Right? So there’s these two. The first one is static. So I like to think of this as anywhere you can’t put a piece of tracking code, right? So you think about it like, Hmm. Where can I not put tracking code? Well, you can’t put tracking code on the side of a truck. You can’t put tracking code on a billboard. You can’t put it in a TV, commercial, or a radio ad.

[00:04:51] Kevin Dieny: Anything where it’s printed, right? Anything where it’s tangibly, physically present. That’s where we use static. It’s where call tracking was birthed is from the need to track, you know, people calling apartments and stuff like that. That’s where our company pioneered the technology is with tracking apartments and putting a different number on each place.

[00:05:11] Kevin Dieny: Right. So, you know, okay, this number is associated only with this place. If anyone calls it, then I know. Basics of call tracking. That’s one side, that’s static call tracking. Number two, that is Online Call Tracking, that’s dynamic. That’s what we want to talk about today. So the dynamic side is any where you can put tracking code, right?

[00:05:30] Kevin Dieny: So that’s your website. You can’t put it in Yelp or listing sites like that. So you have to use static numbers for them, even though they’re on the web. But anytime someone visits your website, that’s where dynamic number insertion, that’s where DNI.

[00:05:43] Kevin Dieny: That’s where online call tracking, campaign call tracking, it’s often called, comes into play. And really, really sophisticated providers today are able to take everything that’s happening in the static world and everything happening on the digital online world. And give you, present you with one platform, one, you know, one way to see, okay, here’s the calls I’m getting.

[00:06:06] Kevin Dieny: What calls are coming from, static sources like the billboard or the ad or the newspaper ad or the yellow pages ad or whatever it is. And then what calls are coming from my Google Ads campaign, my Facebook campaign, Bing campaigns, anything like that. Anything where it’s driving visitors, consumers, patients, whatever it is to your website, that’s what we want to answer.

[00:06:28] Kevin Dieny: That’s what we want to know. So what kinds of campaigns drive people to the website? Well that’s emails, that’s like I said, Google Ads, Organic Traffic, SEO, Social Media. Think about it, where do you have links that are sending people to your website? Why do you want people to go through your website? Well, because that’s where you get to tailor your messaging.

[00:06:50] Kevin Dieny: That’s where you get to position yourself to the ideal prospects, ideal visitors that you’re going after. Someone arrives at the website. They want to see, oh yeah, this is, this speaks to me. This is what I’m going after. This is what I need. You don’t want to be a dentist website and someone arrives there and they go, oh, do they sell, tic-tacs or something.

[00:07:11] Kevin Dieny: You don’t want them to have the wrong impression about who you are. So that’s what your website serving is what it’s doing. And when they get there, if they decide to call or decide to convert at all right. It doesn’t have to be a phone call. You want to know? Okay. Well what got them to the website? The hard part about doing this, marketing wants to do this.

[00:07:30] Kevin Dieny: The hardest part about it is that they rarely convert the very first time they visit your website. It happens. Generally before that point, there’s consideration about whether, you’re the brand they want, whether you have the services they need, maybe how close you are to them.

[00:07:48] Kevin Dieny: What do you stand for? What you’re trying to achieve, what it would be like to use your services, to use your products? Maybe they don’t even know they have a problem yet, but they don’t know that you’re the solution or they don’t know, like what solutions even are. I know people who’ve said like, okay, I have a tooth ache, but that’s not something a dentist fixes.

[00:08:07] Kevin Dieny: And I’ve been like, uh, I think that is. I’m not going to name names there. Uh, it happens, right? Not everything is exactly clear. There’s lots of doctors, but which doctor is the right one to fix a problem. It’s not always really clear. And so sometimes you go through a referral process, okay.

[00:08:25] Kevin Dieny: This doctor, you know, isn’t the specialist I need you. And I got to go to this specialist. So by the time they’re finally ready to go. That’s when they convert. And that’s like I said, rarely, the very first time that they’ve entered this entire foray. They’ve researched it. They’ve educated themselves. As Matt, used to say here, the age of research. Consumers are online searching like crazy and what they’re searching for, what information they’re looking for.

[00:08:51] Kevin Dieny: You want to make sure that you’re, you’re the one they go to to find the answer to it, especially if they’re in your, desired market. A potential future customer, patient, or consumer of your business. So if you’re working hard in marketing, that means you’re trying to have a footprint in the channels that are the most important to you. But which channels and within that, a better answer, a better question, which campaigns within those channels are working most effectively.

[00:09:18] Kevin Dieny: Right? You sent an email out, okay, great. Did people visit your website? Awesome, maybe tons of people visited your website. Maybe you had the best open rate, click rate, land rate ever, you know, you’re the king of email. But if no one converts, then it’s like, well, if that wasn’t a converting email that explains it.

[00:09:39] Kevin Dieny: But if that was a converting email and you intended them to convert and they didn’t. But you got amazing front end stats, but your backend stats are terrible. Then it’s not doing its job, right. A click is not as good as the conversion and the conversion is not as good as someone who’s a qualified person who, you know, it’s not going to waste your team’s time working on leads that are bad.

[00:10:01] Kevin Dieny: So DNI is trying to solve all this. And how does it do that? So dynamic number insertion is helping a business to, track the performance of call conversions from its marketing campaigns. That’s basically the one sentence way to answer that, right? The elevator pitch. So it’s doing that because it’s seeing what visitors are hitting your site from what sources and it’s taking that information.

[00:10:33] Kevin Dieny: And it’s appending or pairing that with the information of those that pick up the phone and call when they see the number or they click the number on the website. So let’s say I’m researching windows. And I happened to see an ad after I’d been researching that says, Hey, You know, we are in your local area.

[00:10:54] Kevin Dieny: We offer there’s a special going on right now for windows. Get a free quote here. I click it. It takes me into a big, long form. I decide, you know what I want to talk to someone first. So I see the number at the top. If I’m on my phone, I could just click the number. Click to call. If not, I might write the number down or pull out my phone while I’m looking at my computer on multiple devices all the time.

[00:11:17] Kevin Dieny: And I call the number ring ring, and someone picks up and they say, hi, how are you doing? I explained what I’m looking for for windows. They give me some information we arrange an appointment for somebody to come out. That’s how that process flows. So afterward the business is going to go look at reports and they’re going to see, okay, here’s somebody.

[00:11:37] Kevin Dieny: They’re in the group of my audience I’ve been targeted with my ads. They typed in a keyword or whatever, for whatever reason they saw my ad. Then they clicked on it and they went to my landing page. Great, that’s what I wanted. That’s, that’s sort of how I’ve designed my marketing campaigns, and it probably sounds familiar to you.

[00:11:53] Kevin Dieny: And then instead of filling out the form, they performed the call. Again, if you actually look at the data on this, a ton of people are willing to call and not fill out forms. For a lot of businesses, way more people call than fill out forms, right. It outpaces that. And then there’s other things like chats and texts.

[00:12:10] Kevin Dieny: But those are another thing we can talk about a little bit later. But anytime someone calls, how am I going to know which campaign? What is it that drove them there? Which ad was it, right?. We were running a campaign that has at least three ad variations because I’m testing stuff.

[00:12:26] Kevin Dieny: Maybe I’m running an ad that has tons of different keywords. Maybe I’m running multiple campaigns, right. Maybe you’re hitting different locations. They could be hitting different problems, things like that. And so I want to know what is it that drove this one specific phone call.

[00:12:42] Kevin Dieny: To an appointment. And maybe I see also that three weeks later, it ended up in a big sale. I spent some amount of money on this campaign. I want to see that it’s returning ROI or return on my investment that I spent. So with DNI, it’s going to watch every visitor that hits your website.

[00:13:01] Kevin Dieny: It’s going to watch those visitors forever long it can. Some tools are better than others for watching, you know, return visitors, especially in a longer time period. Right. Someone’s visited your site six months ago not all the tools, especially if they’re cookie-based are going to have some problems seeing that this visitor was from past, you know, a couple of weeks.

[00:13:19] Kevin Dieny: Just the way the world is. So anyway, this person, I want to see their journey, right. And let’s say for this particular person, I see that they’ve researched beforehand with the sizes of windows. They were there a month before, a couple of weeks before they were looking at what kinds of projects I’ve done in the past.

[00:13:38] Kevin Dieny: And then that day of they came in because of my retargeting ad. That is the last thing they did. And then they converted off that because the DNI tool is going to say, okay, they came from this campaign, they hit these pages or they hit the landing page.

[00:13:53] Kevin Dieny: Ultimately they called the number. I get the call and then I get to see what happened. I get to see beyond the calls, going a little bit further than DNI, like seeing if they set an appointment or not, but I can see the call there. I could see how long it was. I can listen to the recording and I can see all that.

[00:14:07] Kevin Dieny: And so I know right away, okay. This campaign, this retargeting campaign generated this call conversion, awesome. I’m spending this much money on it. It’s sort of giving me a clear picture of, okay, this is what’s driving calls.

[00:14:20] Kevin Dieny: This is what’s driving research and the research is now driving calls, right. You’re getting a really cool picture now for your business of how leads are flowing and how calls are coming in. Now, if you want to listen to call recordings, I don’t think there’s a DNI tool out there that doesn’t have the call recording, right.

[00:14:39] Kevin Dieny: Unless you’re just talking about, link click call tracking, which again is not DNI. And let me just make sure I define what this is. Link click tracking is when someone clicks on a telephone link. So you track, okay, someone clicked the number. It doesn’t mean they actually called it. So it’s not, it’s not a reliable indicator.

[00:15:03] Kevin Dieny: It’s not a reliable indicator of the number of phone calls you actually got. To see that number, you have to have DNI, which is going to track how many people clicked the link, sure. But it’s ultimately what it’s doing is it’s going to tell you how many calls actually connected.

[00:15:21] Kevin Dieny: It’s got to connect and then rang. Now what happens after the call? Goes to voicemail, it gets missed, it just rings, rings, rings. It gets answered, gets mishandled, it gets handled, turned into an appointment. Anything like that, that, that stuff that happens beyond the call. But at that point, the DNI tool is saying, okay, I’ve seen where this visitor came from and I’ve seen they’ve called, awesome.

[00:15:44] Kevin Dieny: Now that all that information is made available to you. Those are like the basic, simple, that’s what you would expect to get with the DNI tool. How many people are calling right here are the calls I have and sources for each and every one of them. That’s the beauty of it. So that should layer with the form fills.

[00:16:03] Kevin Dieny: Maybe there are people who fill out the form. Maybe there are people who went down and, you know, clicked on the chat. Maybe there’s some people who saw the number and said, I don’t like talking to people, we hear this more and more, especially in hospitality. And so they would rather just text.

[00:16:18] Kevin Dieny: So how many people texted it? Right? How many people, saw the landing page? Saw the business name then went and Googled it, then saw your Google My Business. Maybe they saw your business address or location, and then just decided I’m going to drive there. That’s another conversion type, in person. So all of these let’s, let’s, there’s a big circle, right?

[00:16:40] Kevin Dieny: All of these conversions, all of these types of things you want to measure because you’re spending money to drive those results. You’re spending time, resources, right. You’re setting up a process is okay. If they felt the form, then it’s going to go to this team. And then I’m training people who answered the phone.

[00:16:55] Kevin Dieny: When I’m training people who are going to call back, or, you know, there’s a whole lot going on there and that’s expensive. So that’s just to support the marketing, right? That’s not even counting the ad spend or anything like that. So all of the spend it’s gotta be worth it. You’ve gotta be getting conversions for it.

[00:17:14] Kevin Dieny: And so before you spend money, trying to get conversions, you really, really can. This is very important. You really should have a way to track all the conversions that are important to your business. If you don’t have a form on your website, right? You don’t want one, you don’t need one. I don’t know for whatever case you just going to have a phone number there or whatever other means of conversion.

[00:17:38] Kevin Dieny: Some businesses limit themselves to only one type of conversion, fine, whatever it is that you’re trying you have, or you’re using track it. If you don’t have phone numbers, and just have forms. Make sure those forms are tracking properly, right? You gotta know what’s happening. I don’t know where they came from because when you’re spending money, especially on multiple campaigns or testing anything, you got to have a feedback tool.

[00:18:00] Kevin Dieny: That’s going to tell you what is working and what’s not. So that you spend your money more effectively. There’s no one who has a crystal ball of marketing campaigns and they guarantee it’s going to work without testing without researching, without applying different experiments to the ads themselves. Bidding differently, you know, excluding things differently over time, the campaigns called campaign tuning campaign optimization.

[00:18:27] Kevin Dieny: That is a necessary thing. That’s more, what marketing is. Getting it right the first time, not marketing, that’s just, uh, that’s gambling. That’s not gonna work. Expert marketers in the world have a lot of experience over what’s working a lot of wisdom. They’ve done things a lot, so they can save a lot of time and testing, but they don’t eliminate testing altogether.

[00:18:50] Kevin Dieny: It never works that way. So now that we’ve explained the purposes of it, how does this whole thing work? You said it’s on the web, it’s Online Call Tracking. We call it dynamic number insertion, DNI, but what is it actually doing? How does DNI work? Great questions, right?

[00:19:08] Kevin Dieny: It’s important to know because not every DNI solution on every software and, and everything is the same. Also what it’s built for how it’s built is for a purpose. Everything is built for a purpose. A roof has a purpose, pipes have purposes. So just understanding the basics of why they are the way they are really helps you understand.

[00:19:29] Kevin Dieny: Okay, well, this is just a tool for your business to get to a certain answer, certain goal, answer a question, whatever it is, that’s, that’s what everything’s doing. So what is DNI’s purpose. As I’ve just explained, relates to how it’s built and why it works the way it does. So it’s installed, by putting a simple bit of script.

[00:19:49] Kevin Dieny: Every tool I’ve ever come across works this way, you put a script, a usually Java script or some kind of tool could, it might work server side, but generally you put it, just like you put all your other tags, scripts and stuff on your website. And then what it’s going to do is it is going to see traffic coming in and it’s going to see the numbers on your page.

[00:20:10] Kevin Dieny: So those are two things that it’s looking at. Now the numbers on your page, let’s say that there are, I don’t know, let’s take an example. There’s like 50 numbers on a page. Let’s say it’s a page that says here’s all of our locations. Okay, 50 numbers. So each number you want to track. Okay, if someone came from my ad and they landed on this, here’s all my location pages.

[00:20:35] Kevin Dieny: And then they call the number for that specific location. You want to know? Right. What marketing, which campaign, which ad, which keyword, whatever it is, which channel. What is driving calls to that phone number to that business, you know, whatever it is. So every number on that page it’s being looked at and its going to swap the numbers.

[00:21:01] Kevin Dieny: So this is where it gets slightly technical, but only a little. So don’t be afraid. Right? So what do we mean by swapping numbers? So swapping numbers is where the original number on the page is the number we call it the target number here. It’s basically the phone number. It’s going to ring, but the number they see is going to be different.

[00:21:22] Kevin Dieny: We’re going to show them a number out of what we call pools, number pools. So there’s 50 numbers on a page, again, every number, so the 50 numbers, they all have a pool and let’s say it’s 10, 10 numbers in a pool. And when I get there, so Kevin arrives at the page. Now, every number on that page that I’m seeing, I’m going to see 50 numbers, right.

[00:21:44] Kevin Dieny: And I’m going to see a number out of the pool for each number on the page. So I might see 800 location A, 800 location B, 800 location C. I might see those things on the page. Now, each of those numbers is going to dial the actual number, but what that, because we’ve swapped the number, right? So we have the original number of the location, and now we’re showing them a dynamic number. When they call the dynamic number.

[00:22:10] Kevin Dieny: We know, okay, Kevin was on the page, during this session during this time, right? It’s like a business opening, a store. Kevin comes in and then John comes in. It’s like, okay, there’s two people in the store right now. So which one? Which one bought the cake? Well, when Kevin came in, right, I gave him a number. When John came in, I gave him a different number.

[00:22:36] Kevin Dieny: So the person who bought the cake has this number and therefore I know it’s Kevin, or I know it’s John, right? Think of it like that. It’s basically a labeling system. That’s what DNI is doing. So every time a visitor is on your site and every time a business, like basically they’re in your store at the same time we call it concurrent visitors.

[00:22:55] Kevin Dieny: They’re each seeing a unique number. They’re each being labeled. And if they call any time, they’re on the site and they call. What happened and brought them to the site is then sort of married with the data of the phone call afterward. So we see Kevin came in, we gave him a number, he called awesome. So now Kevin has call data attached and so we could see, okay, here’s the call?

[00:23:21] Kevin Dieny: Where do they come from? Or are we looking at it the other way? Here’s Kevin, did he call right? There’s two ways to kind of look at that. So that’s what it’s doing. That’s what all the tools are doing. We’re giving each person a number. Then anytime that person calls, we’re able to take that person’s call and match it to the person.

[00:23:39] Kevin Dieny: All very important. Cause calls are made by people, visitors are sort of people. And so we’re looking at this, like we’re going to treat this call like it came from a person or business. It came from a single entity, whatever it is. And that’s important because we’re not looking at this, like here’s calls that came from the channel here’s calls that came from a campaign because in our CRM, right.

[00:24:05] Kevin Dieny: It’s all just customers, it’s all people. Right. Think of it. Like who’s buying from us? Even at businesses buying from us. When you send an email, you’re sending emails to people.

[00:24:15] Kevin Dieny: So it all works the same. Marketing has always done to people. There might be a marketing done to a company, but it’s to the right people at that company because they’re the ones that make decisions. The company is just a, you know, a box, a cup, a brick store, you know, a bunch of paint and a label on a legal document.

[00:24:33] Kevin Dieny: A company is not really, in essence, the thing that we’re marketing to it’s the people cause they’re the decision makers. So a DNI tool, right. Is set up for visitor call tracking from the campaigns and sources, they came from. There are tools, there are capabilities where you’re like. That’s fine and good, to track every person and to give me calls that are granularly going to tell me where every person’s come from and every call coming from how well each call came from those people.

[00:25:05] Kevin Dieny: But what if I, you know, initially just want to know how many calls I’m getting from ads. I don’t really need to see the calls themselves. I don’t really need to know what’s happening to the calls themselves. I just wanna know, okay. I’m getting twenty-five percent calls from ads or a hundred calls from ads, and I can go, okay.

[00:25:25] Kevin Dieny: Then I’m spending this much in ads and there’s the total calls. So my cost per call is some number that’s like very, very overview, high level. It sounds nice. And it is a good place to start. It’s very simple, but it’s not really a place in my experience where you’re making a lot of changes.

[00:25:44] Kevin Dieny: You may be making big, over big sweeping changes, like, okay, I’m going to spend all my marketing is doing this well. So you’re either going to change all the marketing spend or not. But marketing could be a composition of like five campaigns in four of the five. Right? So this one’s doing well, but the, for the whole other 80% of them are not doing well, but one of them is kicking butt.

[00:26:09] Kevin Dieny: So it’s basically carrying all the rest. Well, as a marketer, you’d be like, Well, that’d be amazing to know because then I could do something about the four and I can bump up the one that’s doing well. Right. That’s essentially what it is. But if you’re just looking at it in aggregate, it’s sorta hard to make those, those, uh, the proper decision.

[00:26:26] Kevin Dieny: Because if you just lowered all the, if you just lowered how much you spend that’s not really going to help you. It’s just going to lower your performance maybe to, to a greater degree than you realize. What DNI is equipping a business with what it should be equipping a business with.

[00:26:44] Kevin Dieny: It’s not just how many calls I’m getting from paid channels or from my advertising channels. It should be okay. How many calls am I getting? Yes, what channels are they coming from? Yes, what campaigns are they coming from? What ads? What keywords, where are calls coming from that I can do something about it? Right.

[00:27:03] Kevin Dieny: That’s a big, big deal. If you had just one campaign, one ad, one keyword or whatever, or maybe you just have an audience then, yeah. Maybe at the overview level, it’s the same thing. But most of the time you’re going to want to run multiple things to at least test something. And you test because that’s what you want to do to improve.

[00:27:26] Kevin Dieny: So that’s the whole purpose of all of this, right? DNI is giving you everything you need to improve by giving you all this wonderful wealth of information. If you don’t plan on improving, if you don’t plan on optimizing, if you don’t plan on evaluating insights and performance to make changes that are going to increase your revenues and profits.

[00:27:47] Kevin Dieny: Then it’s like, well, what are you doing? Why, why are you spending money there? Because you know, it may work for a little while, but it’s going to, it’s going to waste. I mean, if you’re an agency business consultant, and stuff like that, you really want tracking tools from my experience, because you want to prove what you’re doing.

[00:28:02] Kevin Dieny: You’re an agency working for a business. You want to say, okay, I’ll give you this many calls. You know, it came from my campaigns that I did. That way, the business knows. Okay, I’m spending so much on my agency and they’re giving me so much out of it. Right. It’s really important to do that, but also at the agency, if you actually really care about improving the business and getting them, showing them that you can reduce their costs while increasing their gains or revenues or providing them more insight or more learning and education, then you’ve got to be testing.

[00:28:34] Kevin Dieny: You’ve gotta be running tests and things like that. It may not be clear to the business. They may not care that much, that you’re testing reds and blues and greens, colors and things, but showing them like, okay, this month to this month we were able to improve things so much. And for business that’s like, oh great.

[00:28:53] Kevin Dieny: They’re not just, setting things and forgetting, right. They’re not just like washing their hands of this once they’ve proven that I’m happy getting a certain cost per lead or, you know, I feel like I’m getting my return there. They’re still hungry. And after it, and I think that’s important.

[00:29:09] Kevin Dieny: The other thing is, is when you’re a business and you’re like, well, okay, if I get DNI does that just mean a whole lot of work? Does that mean I’m gonna have to listen to phone calls, you know, track, merge, take Excel sheets and merge things together. And am I going to have to be like an Excel wizard?

[00:29:31] Kevin Dieny: Am I gonna have to be a technology guru? Am I gonna have to be a phone call expert? Am I like, what does it really take to get DNI off the ground? So besides being able to put the script on your website, there’s not a ton more you need to do because. Again, most the right DNI solutions for your business are going to make it so that you don’t have to manage the pools.

[00:29:54] Kevin Dieny: You don’t have to know which numbers are in there. If there’s enough numbers in the pool, right. Which numbers they’re looking at, you know, you don’t have to worry too much about that. And you also want it to take the calls that are coming from your visitor data and then be able to integrate or push that information where it matters.

[00:30:13] Kevin Dieny: So here’s an example, you’re running Google Ads, awesome. You’re running campaigns that are for converting people, someone clicks on the ad, they get to your site. They like what they see and they convert, they call let’s say. So how does that conversion tell you? And the tools that you use that a conversion happened, so that the tools can tell you so that you can tie things back to the sources of the campaign.

[00:30:41] Kevin Dieny: So the right way for this to all to happen, is this to happen in like a sequence. And that is when the call occurs off the website. The first thing we want to do is tell the website. The thing that’s tracking the website is an analytics tool, web analytics, right? The most common of these is Google Analytics. So the online call tracking, dynamic number tool, should integrate and tell Google Analytics that a conversion occurred.

[00:31:06] Kevin Dieny: You also want this tool to not just tell Google Analytics, Hey, I call I’ll call came in. You want it to integrate with Google Analytics in a way where it adds that call information. And I think the best way for it to do this is with an event on to the Google Analytics tracking cookie that’s already tracking them.

[00:31:27] Kevin Dieny: So if Kevin comes in the business, Google Analytics says, oh, Kevin, here’s the number. And the DNI tool says, okay, Right. Kevin calls, well, the DNI tool is going to say, Hey, Google analytics. They called here’s the information you need. In addition to the data you’ve, you’ve gathered because Google Analytics is not a call tracking tool, right?

[00:31:47] Kevin Dieny: So you’re telling Google Analytics what call occurred by giving it event information, which is the proper way to do it, boom. And your Google Analytics. Now you can see calls you’re getting plus any information Google Analytics has been tracking on them. The Google Analytics tracks a lot, Google’s tracking tons of data on them.

[00:32:05] Kevin Dieny: They’re seeing, the technology, the browser, the location, all this information. All this really interesting stuff that you can use in your business to see, analyze how campaigns are working. Now, Google Analytics then is a great connector for other things like Google Ads, right? It’s going to tell Google Ads.

[00:32:26] Kevin Dieny: Someone converted and here’s the Google Analytics, cookie, here’s all the information and tells Google Ads. Google Ads says, awesome. Now in Google ads, it’s going to show your campaign, and then next to it it’s going to show in the conversions column, you’re getting conversions.

[00:32:42] Kevin Dieny: Hold up for a second here, Google Ads has something called phone calls, right? But those are calls that are happening off the ad itself, which is a static number. Right. Can’t put script and code inside an ad in Google Adwords. It won’t let you, so that is static calls. So if someone sees your ad and doesn’t visit your website and they just call the number right there, those are phone calls from ads.

[00:33:04] Kevin Dieny: Now, if they go to your website, boom, that’s DNI. Right? So now all of that should. All that should be a little clearer now. Last few questions here. That from that are really common online that will help our listeners. So we’ve gone over that DNI tracks numbers.

[00:33:20] Kevin Dieny: We’ve gone over that, the numbers on the page that it’s looking at are being swapped from numbers in pools that are each assigned to each unique person, that’s coming to the page. That’s how it’s doing it. That way, a unique call attached to a person, right. Has a unique visit information attached to a person.

[00:33:37] Kevin Dieny: You’re getting alignment there, very, very good alignment. So this is sort of another way to look at it as like a consumer tracking or visitor tracking. It’s on the visitor level, the consumer level it’s down there where we’re tracking what a visitor’s done. Versus, channel DNI is basically anytime someone comes from an ad, I show them one number.

[00:33:58] Kevin Dieny: So if John and Kevin, and Steve all come in and they’re holding an ad, right, whatever that ad is, wherever that ad came from. If they tell me, oh, I came from an ad, I just say, okay, an ad caused them to come here and that’s where the calls are coming from. Now what ad it was why it was that one, which one, if I’m doing multiples right, again, I’ve kind of explained this.

[00:34:23] Kevin Dieny: It’s not giving you that information. So that’s why it’s not as ideal. And sometimes, and like I said before, people don’t convert on the very first time they’re there. They also rarely convert off the ad because they’ve come in from an ad, then later they come in organically, then they come direct. That’s typically the waterfall down staircase that they follow.

[00:34:47] Kevin Dieny: So it’s really hard to get conversions where the very last thing they did is from an ad. It’s the first time they’re ever on your site. It’s, it’s kind of stacking the deck against you. That’s why it’s hard to, you know, make it seem like man, I’m getting no conversions from ads. Well, if you looked at the actual array of the journey, you’d see, okay, you did bring them in with ads and then organically and then ads again, and then maybe direct, maybe social there’s all these touches with them.

[00:35:14] Kevin Dieny: Maybe they just saw your ad and they didn’t click on it. All this stuff is going into it. And that’s why it sort of becomes costly for marketing to have things everywhere. But once you do have proper campaigns everywhere with proper DNI tracking, you are able to see, okay, what’s bringing people to my website from all the different sources, which is important.

[00:35:36] Kevin Dieny: And then when they get there, which people are converting. That’s to me, the big, first leg of the journey. So lots of numbers can be in pools. They’re almost always toll-free numbers, right? I think with most DNI providers, you get the caller ID, you might get some other information. That comes along with it.

[00:35:55] Kevin Dieny: You will get, call sources the details of the call duration, any other, visitor information from the web. You’ll get that as well. It’s really important that you get returning versus new caller.

[00:36:08] Kevin Dieny: Or new versus returning patient or whatever it is, you know, customer non-customer. Those things can be a little bit more important too if you can get those by your provider. You shouldn’t be needing to make a new campaign every time you want to run, a new DNI pool, every time you want to run campaigns, it’s just a hassle.

[00:36:25] Kevin Dieny: It’s nice to just have any campaigns you want to run all the time, not needing to change up pools. That’s just a hassle. How many numbers you need in the pool, right? Should correspond with the number of people concurrently that are going to be on your website. Usually that I think, I think it’s usually between like five and 50 or something.

[00:36:42] Kevin Dieny: It’s like probably the average pool size. I don’t really know that I’ve just heard. You don’t need to be a tech expert. It’s very easy and quick to set this up. And it will do everything else for you. It’s going to connect to Google Analytics, Google Ads, whatever it is, right. It’s going to make the integrations and connections.

[00:36:59] Kevin Dieny: There should be web hooks or API access, whatever it is so that you can send data wherever you need it to be sent. Everything should be, should work like without you needing to do really anything. All you should be focusing on is running the best marketing campaigns possible, right? The tools for tracking have been set up before and they should just go, they should just work really well.

[00:37:20] Kevin Dieny: Calls can be routed. You know, that’s a pretty simple thing. You should probably find a way to track all your conversion types. So forms, calls, texts, chats. We do all those things, but just make sure that you would, if you’re using a tool for each one of them are using tools to do pieces of them, that you’re doing all the ones that are important to your business.

[00:37:38] Kevin Dieny: You should have a way, especially if you’re doing offline and online, right. Static using static and digital numbers, which most businesses are. You should have a way to see both sources, both, all that data, right? What’s driving all those calls no matter where the marketing is being placed. Then the last thing that’s really worth mentioning here is what happens on the second leg.

[00:38:05] Kevin Dieny: And that’s, it’s less, it less matters to what DNI is, which is why it’s not really for this topic, but essentially the second leg is what’s happened on the call. So what happened on the call is okay, was the call missed? Did it get connected? Did it go to voicemail? Things like that, but it’s also how well was the call handled?

[00:38:30] Kevin Dieny: Did an appointment come out of it, did it not get handled well? Was it not a prospect? Was it just, you know, someone, was it a sister calling or someone calling for a job or whatever it is you’re after and not after. Right. So in terms of looking at this right way, how many visitors hit your site from channels? Is important.

[00:38:49] Kevin Dieny: How many are clicking on the phone number, clicking on the submit button of the form, or clicking on the chat button. Important, probably more, much more important in every regard is how many conversions leads, patients, prospects, whatever it is you’re getting great.

[00:39:04] Kevin Dieny: Now, how many of those are qualified? That’s the second leg now. They’re qualified. How many of those are turning into appointments, to deals, to sales, opportunities? The closer you get to the sale, the better you’re going to be able to be right at improving your marketing, your business, growing all of this.

[00:39:22] Kevin Dieny: So DNI is just a tool to help you get closer to that goal, right? It’s in itself just during the first leg. Now there are tools and services. I think most companies, that have scoring or an analysis or, call analytics function to them. Have a feature where they listen to calls or they use a software like Siri or something to tell you, okay, generally what happened on the call. Now, whatever that, whatever they they’re doing to help you figure out what happened on the call.

[00:39:53] Kevin Dieny: So you don’t have to listen to it. Those are like the bolt-on things for you as a business leader to decide, you know, what’s important. If I want to spend my time listening to calls or do I want someone else to do it right? That’s something for you to decide. But the first part is really important, tracking the conversions, where they come from, when they happen, every conversion type.

[00:40:13] Kevin Dieny: So you have a better, clearer picture. If you don’t have the information, you’re not going to make the best decision. It’s really critical to have DNI in a business where a business is using phone calls, where phone calls are important to the business. If you’re setting appointments for your business, if you have a website, if you’re running campaigns, multiple campaigns, you see any of these conditional things that you have in your business, they kind of lead me to say, yeah, you should get DNI, this is why it’s important for you.

[00:40:40] Kevin Dieny: And this is why you need to get on it because you need to have this set up before you’re running, you know, before you’re generating leads. You kind of just wasting money there. You could be generating, you could be only tracking form fills today, but having twice as many phone calls come in for it and not have any idea that it’s coming from the ad or whether it’s not coming from the ad, you’d really want to know right.

[00:40:58] Kevin Dieny: What it, what it is it. So knowing what it is is important, knowing that DNI is dynamic number insertion. Whatever, but knowing at the end of the day, okay. I, now I know what it is, cause this is how it’s going to help and serve my business. That’s a big deal. So I hope that this has helped you. It’s one of those topics where it’s like a back to basics a little bit, but just to cover the whole thing, you know, your digital management, digital campaigns, how you’re running campaign tracking, that’s all really important to a business who’s trying to grow and is leveraging the digital online marketing to do it.

[00:41:31] Kevin Dieny: So thank you again. Thanks for listening. And I hope you’ve gotten a lot out of this. Thank you.