What’s New In Call Tracking – from Marchex

We want to say thank you to Marchex, our call tracking partner, who made managed to make it to the cold and snowy Montreal office all the way from New York and Seattle.

Thanks guys! It was a pleasure to have you yesterday, helping the company learn a bit more about what differentiates you and where you’re hoping to go in the future.

To give our users a bit of an update as well, here are some of the features you can look forward to in 2015 from the Acquisio Marchex partnership.

Why does call tracking matter?

More searchers call a company than visit their website on mobile. To track and understand these conversions, call tracking is essential for local businesses.

Call tracking 101

Our friends at Marchex created this easy to follow call tracking flow chart, showing exactly how call tracking works within their company. If you’re wondering how call tracking works with most vendors, here’s a great image to keep in mind.

Who is Marchex?

Marchex is a mobile advertising technology company that uses a combination of ad networks, paid search solutions, advanced analytics technologies and a team of leading data scientists to provide deep insights into call conversions and analytics.

Their call tracking allows advertisers to see which channels an ad campaign hit, how many consumers were reached, who made a phone call and what happened on that call so that advertisers can maximize the value of their ad campaigns.

Why is Marchex different?

Marchex stands out from other call tracking vendors due to sheer size. The publically traded company holds the largest number of local numbers in North America and boasts:

• More than 100K customers
• 425 million call connections annually

With more than 400 employees, and about half of them working on developing and improving call tracking technologies, Marchex relies heavily on automation.

The exciting stuff

Call DNA

Traditionally, call tracking vendors record calls and share call recordings with advertisers so they can listen in on calls and analyze them manually. For large scale companies this isn’t efficient.

Marchex, with tens of millions of calls per month, finds that automating this process is much more scalable.

The company provides visual representation of a phone call based on speech signals. The system runs a call through their architecture and can tell when a caller is speaking when an agent is speaking, when credit card information is being shared (to blank out personal information) and more.

Large advertisers run 100,000 phone calls a month, listening to all those manually is not a fun process. So this technology could help immensely, allowing advertisers to look at a call report, see where people are talking and zoom in on areas of importance for analysis.

Pattern Matching

Duration isn’t a good proxy to qualify calls. Too often advertisers pay per qualified call, but calls are judged as qualified based on the length of time of a call. Marchex looks at the call and judges whether it was an authentic and worthwhile conversion, excluding hang-ups, telemarketers and people who stay on hold and hung up after long wait times.

Using pattern matching, the call tracking vendor can tell based on signalling if a conversation is between two people or more, if it was a wrong number and so on. This helps advertisers quickly scan call data for important information.

Plus, there is another product that detects keywords, transcribes the phone call and provides elements and keywords that are of interesting to advertisers. Pretty sweet!

Coming soon

Acquisio is working to support and share these features with our clients in the new year, and both companies will continue to help local business get as much value from call tracking data as possible, so keep an eye out.