What Are The Dangers Of Call Tracking? – INFOGRAPHIC

I hear a lot of common concerns about call tracking. Most are quite valid, so let’s address them here to make sure you don’t make the mistakes that many do.

Keeping the same number (for NAP consistency and vanity numbers)

Your Name, Address, and Phone number ought to be consistent across the indexed web. This is NAP consistency, which is an important ranking factor in modern local search.

Solution:

1. Dynamic Number Insertion
2. Using Javascript to swap out numbers, depending on the visitor.
3. Keep the number semi-consistent
4. Your rankings won’t take a massive hit. Keeping one number per paid campaign, for example, will help you much more in marketing intelligence than it could hurt you in SEO.

Your SEO guy holding onto your numbers

I wish I didn’t have to say this, but some shady SEO practices are going on out there. Some agencies try to keep their finger on the button of your campaigns, so if you want to show them the door, all the progress they’ve made for you goes with them.

There are two steps to preventing this:

1. Educate yourself on how call tracking works. Use it on your own for at least one advertisement, just to get a solid understanding of the process.
2. Make sure any contract you have with an external marketing team addresses the ownership of numbers generated for call tracking purposes.

Dirty numbers

Eventually, a phone number goes around the block. It doesn’t commonly cause a problem, but from time to time you might get a brand new call tracking number that another business once used. It might have been a spa resort or a drug dealer. There’s often no way to find out. Either way, you’ll get a few calls from disappointed callers looking for the other business. It’s a small price to pay. The longer you use a dirty number, the fewer wrong calls you’ll get (and it’s rare in any case).

If you’re concerned with having a number which used to be associated with something shady, simply do a Google search with the number in quotation marks, including the various ways phones are written (with/without the area code, with/without the digits grouped together). If it’s not indexed by Google, there’s nothing to worry about.

Legal Concerns

In the United States, call recording is legal from cost to cost. There are some regulations, which depend on the state. See this article by Digital Media Law to read up on these regulations. Before you begin, simply check whether you need to be registered as a call recorder in areas you will be targeting.

Most regulations simply require you to notifying the caller that their conversation will be recorded. I’m sure you’ve heard a pre-recorded message telling you this in the past.

*Disclaimer: I’m not a lawyer, and nothing I say qualifies as legal advice.

Learn more how to do call tracking like a boss with our Ultimate Call Tracking Guide.

Sources:

1. Think With Google, The Role of Click to Call in the Path to Purchase
2. Search Engine Journal, An SEO Beginner Guide: What is Call Tracking and Why Should I Care?
3. Less Everything, Adding A Phone Number To LessAccounting Increased Our Paid User Base

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