Call Tracking 101

A dental practice traditionally has a single phone number that is published publicly, and patients call that number to reach the office. This number is usually provided by phone companies and rings the handsets in the office.

Many dental offices publish the same number on different channels like Yelp, Google Business, website, etc. which is not an effective way for tracking calls because this would provide no way for an office to tell where an incoming call is coming from. The office will have to depend on asking patients manually where and how they found the office and go based on anecdotal and incomplete information collected by the staff from the patients manually. This way of tracking is not effective and cannot be plugged into ad platforms like Google.

The basic idea for tracking calls is the following:

1. Each marketing channel, and in some cases each marketing campaign, is assigned a new unique phone number. These numbers are known as “Proxy Phone Numbers”.
2. When somebody calls any of these proxy numbers, the call is forwarded to the main number of the practice; hence they are called proxy numbers because their only purpose is to provide the ability to know which channel the call is coming from.

This is the basic call tracking function but there are more complex variations of this setup that will be covered in this article that will allow dental offices to track calls from dynamic sources.

Tracking Opportunities that will be covered:

•         Individual tracking number
•         DNI – website tracking
•         Google  tracking
•         Website or landing page form tracking
•         Facebook leads import