Why Do I Need a Call Pool for a Website?
I had a client ask a question that I did not have an answer. I hope someone here can answer this question.
When setting up a new company, the process involves determining where the number(s) will be used. If a "website" is specified, the process requires a Call Pool with a minimum of 4 numbers. I was always under the impression this was due to the fact that several people may be on the website at any given time, and Call Rail would swap out a number for each visitor from the call pool. Seems logical right?
Well, when viewing the Call Log for any company, 80% or more of all Calls come from Google My Business, and on a GMB listing, there is not a Call Pool being used to swap out. So it stands to reason that at any given time, there may be multiple people looking at a GMB listing, and numbers are not being swapped out, but calls are going through.
So do I really need a Call Pool for a website?
Thank you.
Comments
Good morning, Thomas. This is a great question!
Source-level call tracking (a single phone number) allows you to create a unique tracking phone number for each marketing campaign you want to track. However, if you're looking to receive PPC keyword data for your calls, see visitor timelines for callers, or if you're looking to see your calls as conversions within Google Ads, you'll want to use Visitor-level tracking (website pools).
While not required, we highly recommend using website pools on your website because it allows us to gather far more data on the visitor's session. Here's the data we can collect with website pools:
- Source Type (Google PPC, Google Organic, referrals from yelp.com, etc.).
- Keywords (for all PPC, including Bing & Yahoo calls).
- Landing page.
- Complete page view history of the caller.
- Referring domain.
- Medium.
- Tracking number called.
- Date and time of the call.
- Caller ID.
- City.
- Duration of the call.
- Device type.
- Any ValueTrack and/or UTM parameters configured for your ad campaigns.
Using a single phone number for every page on your site will only tell you the date and time of the call and the caller ID.
Let me know if you have any further questions!
That's a great answer and totally understandable. Thank you.
I'm so glad that was helpful. You're welcome!
Thank you for explaining this. I sent this to my team, who also had the same questions.
Hey Jennifer Bagley,
I'm glad to hear you found this helpful. Welcome to the community!
Thanks so much for your explanation!
Hey John Leonard,
I'm happy to hear you found this explanation helpful. Let me know if you have any questions, & welcome to the community!
I have a question about setting up a website pool when testing different variants of landing pages. If I am using the same pool number for both versions, it will be able to track "click to calls" (when someone clicks on a website phone number button) but what happens if someone goes to the page, writes down the number and then calls it later from a landline. What landing page would get credit for that call?
Hey Leanne,
You can use a single website pool for your landing page variants to track your website visitors and their session data. If someone visits the site, writes the number down, and then calls from a landline, we will collect and provide the session data (including which variant they landed on) in your reporting. The caller does not have to directly "click to call" for us to get that information and differentiate between landing page variants. We get the information based on which website pool number they are shown and then call.
If the website visitor lands on the site, writes the number down, and then waits a few days to place their first call, this can cause misattribution if that same website pool number has now been shown to a new visitor before the first visitor was able to place their first call. However, someone writing a number down and not calling right away is not super common these days.
I hope this is helpful, and please don't hesitate to let me know if you have any further questions or concerns!
It would be really nice if you could remove the minimum limit of 4 numbers though. A lot of users (me included) would be fine with just 2 numbers per pool. Which would cut the cost in half to $6.00 per website pool instead of $12.00.
Hi Joachim!
Welcome and thank you for posting in Community!
I appreciate you bringing this topic up. Our minimum for webpools is set at 4 due to prevention of misattribution for sourcing of calls to your website.
Sometimes in the event if there is an increase in visitors to your website, and there aren't enough tracking numbers in the webpool, it could possibly keep from sourcing a website visit properly for your calls. We definitely do not want an issue to happen where there are not enough tracking numbers to capture the session data for you and not having accurate data.
Hope this helps!
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