12 Call Tracking Metrics To Optimize Pay Per Call Performance

By tracking pay per call metrics, you can measure the performance of your lead distribution to inform partners, optimize software, and adjust decision logic. Sales call center metrics, in turn, help you track your sales reps’ performance, tech stack efficiency, and routing effectiveness.

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Whether you distribute calls between buyers or route them to your sales reps, monitoring and analyzing your performance metrics is absolutely crucial. This way, you can identify all the strengths and weaknesses at the product, campaign, ping tree, or even tech stack levels, doubling down on what works and eliminating what doesn’t.

“As long as you’re tracking your calls in the same way that you track your web leads in terms of attributing value back to all of your media buying platforms, whether it be your social media platforms or Google or wherever you’re doing, let the algorithm do its thing and go away.

Allowing the algorithm to target customers is valuable for you. A lot of people track every little thing from their web leads to make sure they’re optimizing their advertising spend, but they don’t do it for calls. So I think calls are maybe being treated unfairly, not being tracked to the same level. You’re just not letting the platforms do their thing.” – David Pickard, CEO, Phonexa, during the Pioneering Pay-Per-Call Excellence webinar

Having said that, proper call tracking requires proper tools. For internal sales calls, CRMs often suffice; however, for large-scale pay per call campaigns, you need dedicated call management software, such as Call Logic by Phonexa.

Get started with Phonexa to maximize profit from your call campaigns.

Without further ado, let’s analyze the best pay per call metrics.

Call Tracking Metrics for Pay Per Call

Call Volume

Call volume allows you to track how many inbound calls you acquire on different levels:

• General level (total calls): Reveals whether your business is growing and at what rate
• Campaign level: Highlights strategies and audiences to capture the most traffic
• Partner level: Helps identify productive and underperforming affiliates

But be careful not to over-focus on call volume. It’s one thing to get lots of calls and another to convert them into paying clients. So make sure your traffic is monetizable, not just high-volume.

Call Source

By leveraging DNI, you can effectively differentiate traffic sources and identify which callers belong to which marketing campaigns, affiliates, and sources. And then you can set up custom distribution logic for different call sources, such as connecting calls from location A to buyer A and calls from source B exclusively to buyer B. 

Call Duration

First of all, call duration is useful for measuring your on-the-line performance. If your caller journeys, either agent- or IVR-driven, are cumbersome, you won’t be able to engage customers, and they will hang up early.

But it’s also useful for determining which campaigns, ads, keywords, or landing pages generate high-quality calls. So if the bottleneck isn’t with your distribution or sales reps’ skills, you’ll be able to identify and fix it.

Call Location

If you’re in insurance, home services, solar, or other location-based niches, knowing your callers’ physical locations is important. For example, as a solar installer in Chicago, you might be interested only in targeting users in the city and its immediate vicinity, rejecting anyone whose ZIP code or phone number indicated that they are from a different state.

Concurrency

For large-scale businesses, it’s crucial to know how many calls you can handle at the same time –  not only because you want to avoid call queues, but also because you want to avoid a delay that might occur if your call system gets overwhelmed. 

Typically, a delay of around 200 milliseconds becomes intolerable to callers. So knowing your concurrency values helps in choosing software that meets your operational demands. 

Qualified Call Rate

Paired with your call volume, the qualified call rate helps understand whether you are delivering or receiving high-quality traffic. This metric is a great benchmark for your targeting and overall effectiveness. Just log your qualified-to-unqualified call ratios, and you’ll get a holistic view of performance dynamics over a specific period.

Here’s a caveat: A qualified call rate can be misleading if your qualification rules are off, so it’s also important to measure conversion rates across products, campaigns, and call sources.

Revenue Per Call

Revenue per call is a strong efficiency metric that, when compared against your cost per call, reveals your gross profit margin. For example, if you bought a call for $10 and sold it for $20, the revenue per call metric tells you that your gross profit margin is 50%.

If you’re not hitting your gross profit margin targets, it may signal that you need to reconsider your pay per call strategy.

Conversion Rates

Conversion rate is one of the most important call tracking metrics, showing how many qualified callers actually convert into paying customers for your business or the buyer you’re connecting your calls to. For example, low conversion rates might mean that buyers receive low-converting calls, and you have to adjust your distribution strategy.

Likewise, conversion rates help eliminate poor traffic sources or, if your calls convert better than average, increase the sale price.

Caller Reputation Score

According to TrafficGuard data, about 17% of all affiliate traffic is fake, making affiliate fraud a problem to reckon with. 

As a Phonexa client, you can mitigate fraud with iClear, a risk analysis integration that flags mismatched and potentially fraudulent calls and leads before you accept them. With iClear, you can check the caller’s location, email, IP address, and more specific data, such as infraction history or bankruptcy records.

Get started with Phonexa to grow your ROI by only accepting high-quality calls and leads.

Transfer Rate

The transfer rate indicates the percentage of callers who reached the wrong department and were transferred; if it occurs, it typically indicates problems with distribution logic at the product, ping tree, or campaign level, or suboptimal IVR settings.

In some niches, however, the problem may be that people don’t want to navigate through rigid decision trees. That’s when you may consider using AI-driven agents instead of traditional IVR.

Lead-to-Account Matching

Lead-to-account matching measures the speed at which callers are synced with their historical data in CRM. For the most part, you want your lead-to-account matching to be fast to enable screen pops and call whispers.

To accelerate your lead-to-account matching, you may need to pass data between solutions using real-time webhooks or server-to-server integrations, or simply use a unified tech stack.

Revenue Per Agent

Revenue per agent is a standard metric for surfacing your top sales reps. Knowing who converts callers better, you can analyze how they overcome objections, upsell, cross-sell, etc., and make improvements across the rest of the team. On top of that, you can reward the best performers.

Phonexa: Enterprise-Grade Pay Per Call Software

Whether you’re running pay per call campaigns, generating calls for your own call center, or doing any other type of business around inbound calls, Phonexa’s enterprise-grade call and lead tracking and distribution software suite can help you do it much more effectively. 

From omnichannel tracking to real-time call screening to in-depth analytics, Phonexa’s Call Logic has everything you need to cover your call generation and acquisition campaigns from top to bottom. For web leads, LMS Sync will do the same. And then you can use our additional features for email and SMS marketing, follow-ups, conversion rate optimization, and more.

 

Here are the two core modules you get as a client with Phonexa:

Here are the six additional features you get as a client with Phonexa:

Take a product tour to experience Phonexa’s tools in action.

Frequently Asked Questions

What software do you need to measure your pay per call performance?

Monitoring your pay per call campaigns requires specialized software, such as Phonexa’s Call Logic, a call tracking and management system that offers dynamic number insertion (DNI) for attribution, a ping tree for call distribution, and more.

Can you use Phonexa’s software for call routing?

Although Phonexa has this functionality, it’s more of a complementary feature. So, if your primary goal is to generate calls and route them between your sales reps, it’s better to opt for CRMs, which are designed specifically for managing customers.

What are the most important call tracking metrics for pay per call?

If we had to name only a few metrics to track for your pay per call campaigns, they would be call source for the right attribution, concurrency to ensure no calls are wasted, and revenue per call to measure your revenue.