Call tracking

Call tracking assigns a phone number, or a tag on your main number, so you can tell which ad, page, or directory produced the call. Without it, every ring looks the same. The owner remembers the job that closed and forgets whether it started on Google, a yard sign, or a paid listing. The next month's spending is then a guess.

A tracked number forwards to the real phone. The caller does not need to know. What you gain is a source on the lead: this call came from the website, that one from a truck wrap's number, this one from a local services ad. The lead record should store that source next to the name and the job. A report that lives only inside the phone vendor, separate from the customers, gets ignored.

Tracking is not the same as recording every word, and it is not a substitute for answering. A perfect source tag on a missed call is a labeled loss. Pair tracking with a response: someone calls back, or missed-call text back goes out, and the lead exists in the CRM with the source already on it. Then you can see which sources produce conversations, not just rings.

Be careful with the count. One person who calls three times is one lead, not three wins. A number printed in the wrong place will attribute a referral to an ad. Check the forwarding once when you set it up, and again when you change a page. Call tracking that you do not trust is worse than none, because it makes you confident and wrong.

Puffly's lead list can hold where the inquiry came from, whether it started as a call or a form. The point of tracking is the next decision: keep the source that turns into sold work, and stop feeding the one that only rings.