Call tracking has become the industry standard in the legal industry. The benefits of call tracking include:

• – Understanding the customer journey,
• – Gain insight into which referral sources are more likely to lead to phone calls,
• – Quality control to ensure that your team is answering the phone the right way

In this article, we review the 5 most popular call tracking services:

• CallRail
• Hubspot
• Invoca
• CallFire, and
• CallSource.

Here’s what you need to know.

How Does Call Tracking Software Work?

Call tracking software provides online marketing analytics by tracking each website visitor’s journey to and through your website. You receive this information when the user calls the phone number on your website. The call tracking software accomplishes this by changing the contact number provided to website users. To more fully understand the technology behind call tracking software, consider two situations in which a prospective client contacts your firm.

Intake Without Call Tracking Software

In this scenario, your website lists a fixed contact number. Most firms use their main number on their website. However, marketing-savvy firms post a different contact number so they can identify calls that originate from the website. Your firm’s receptionist answers the call. As the receptionist speaks to the prospect, the receptionist might create a call record. This record usually includes contact information, such as the prospect’s name and phone number. The receptionist might also ask how the prospect found the firm. The answers to this question might tell you which potential clients find the firm through:

• Referrals
• Search engines like Google
• Google My Business profiles
• Legal directories like Avvo
• Print ads
• Broadcast ads
• Your website

The receptionist might collect the information from the prospect using a paper form or spreadsheet. Your marketing department or the lawyer who oversees marketing might review this information periodically and adjust marketing campaigns based on the results.

Intake With Call Tracking Software

Call tracking software will change the contact number listed in your online content. For example, the software might rotate through thirty different phone numbers as people access your website. If you access your website from your phone at noon, you may see a different contact phone number than your assistant who accessed the website from their desktop computer at 4 p.m. In addition to your website contact number, the call tracking software might also change the contact number used in:

• Email marketing
• Digital ads
• Blog CTAs

This allows the software to associate a marketing record with a real person who calls your office. If someone calls your office using the number 555-2117, the call tracking software would associate the caller with the user who received that phone number through your website, ads, or other online marketing campaigns. Instead of asking the prospective client how they found your firm, the call tracking software provides you with an online browsing record. This information can give you many data points, including:

• Search keywords the prospect used
• Ads served to the prospect
• Pages visited by the prospect
• Third-party demographic data

This record gives you the prospect’s complete journey from finding your online presence to calling your office. Armed with this information, you can fine-tune your keyword research and content marketing strategy, pursue more effective pay-per-click (PPC) marketing campaigns, and adjust other marketing efforts that might not be having the effect you want.

The 5 Best Call Tracking Software for Lawyers

Here are some call tracking software packages with some pros and cons of each. CallRail can insert dynamic numbers into social media posts, PPC ads, and emails. It can also track website visitors by the keywords they used to reach your site. Some pros include:

• Free trials available
• Tracking for offline advertising, like print media
• Integrated support for texting
• Expandable to add more features

Some cons include:

• No CRM integration
• Chat support requires a separate purchase

CallRail provides a basic entry-level software package that you can expand to support additional features. It can give you a taste of the power of call tracking without a financial commitment. HubSpot offers a call tracking module with its Sales Hub software product. HubSpot does not charge extra for call tracking. HubSpot charges a monthly subscription for Sales Hub, but you can try it for free. Pros include:

• Integrated with Sales Hub marketing tools
• Integrated with Sales Hub CRM and Salesforce CRM
• Automatic call logs available

Cons include:

• Small firms and solo practices might not use all of the features of Sales Hub
• Sales Hub is not optimized for legal practices and the rules on lawyer advertising

HubSpot offers many features that can help law firms optimize their marketing budgets. But Sales Hub was not designed for law firms and includes many features you will not – or cannot – use, like call recording. Invoca is one of the leading call tracking software vendors. It recently acquired its primary competitor Dialogtech. As a result, Invoca controls much of the call tracking software industry. In addition to conventional call tracking, its software package uses artificial intelligence to analyze calls to gather real-time call information. Some of the pros of Invoca include:

• Integration with most marketing platforms, including Google, Microsoft, and Facebook
• Intelligent call routing

The main drawback of Invoca is that it was designed as an enterprise solution for large businesses. Most law firms will not use the most powerful tools in Invoca. CallFire provides many features for small- to medium-sized firms. It lacks some of the more robust features provided by Invoca and other enterprise software packages. Some pros include:

• Links to Google Analytics
• Integrated support for texts
• A flexible interface that allows customized alerts
• Per-call or per-text pricing

Some of the cons include:

• You must purchase phone numbers from CallFire’s database
• Fees can accumulate if you receive long calls, many calls, or many texts

CallFire provides basic call tracking with reports that you can use to optimize both your online and offline marketing. CallSource offers a feature not available in many other call tracking software packages. When a prospective client calls, CallSource can track whether the prospect schedules a consultation or not. This means that you can learn which marketing channels provide leads but also which marketing channels give you the best conversion rate, turning prospects into clients. The drawback of CallSource is that it requires you or your website designer to integrate a line of code into your website design. For smaller firms or solo practitioners, you might need to buy a custom website instead of a template website. CallSource provides a full suite of marketing tools. Its call tracking software integrates with Google, Facebook, and Bing to provide data for all a firm’s marketing channels.

How Do I Choose the Best Call Tracking Software For My Law Firm?

As you evaluate call tracking software, you will need to balance a few considerations, such as:

• Cost
• Features, and
• Ease of use.

Different firms will weigh these factors differently. For instance, law firms on a tight budget or those not hyper-focused on a huge ROI might want something that’s less expensive and fairly simple. Other firms, particularly those eager to understand what’s driving prospective clients to them, might be less concerned about cost and more focused on getting software that includes more sophisticated features.  If the features of the software help capture more clients and generate more revenue, the firm can justify the cost of the software. You should not assume that one call tracking software package will work for every situation. Instead, you should consider your goals in using call tracking software and whether each package meets or exceeds your goals.

How Much Does Call Tracking Software Cost?

Firms get billed for call tracking software in a few different ways:

Free Software

Free software can be a good option if you’re on a tight budget or want to try a new software out, but you’ll need to bear a few considerations in mind. First, the vendor might provide the free software as part of a larger package. For example, a marketing agency might provide free access to the software if you hire the agency to handle your online campaigns. Secondly, free software might not have the breadth of features you can get by paying for a software package. For example, free software might not integrate with your third-party client relationship management (CRM) software.

Subscription Software

Subscription software usually gets billed periodically. As long as you pay the subscription fee, you can use the software. The benefit of a subscription fee is predictability in your costs for the software. Subscriptions also allow you to pick a level of features commensurate with your budget. When you have more to spend, you can upgrade your subscription or move to a different package without a long-term commitment.

User Licenses

User licenses or seat licenses require you to pay based on the number of users who access the software. This is often a good model for smaller firms or firms with a dedicated marketing team. By paying for a predetermined number of users, you can control your costs. Even more importantly, user licenses are usually paid based on a one-time annual fee, rather than an ongoing subscription fee.

Per-Call Fees

Per-call fees can be tempting because they only result in charges when the software generates a record. You never get charged for users who never call. Firms often use this fee structure to test out call tracking software. But beware – the fee could end up being very high if you get a lot of calls, even if leads aren’t converted into clients.

Features of Call Tracking Software

Remember that the goal of call tracking software is to optimize your marketing dollars. The more information your call tracking software can provide, the better you will understand the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. Some features you might look for include:

Real-Time Tracking

Real-time tracking gives you the caller’s information when they call. Your receptionist can customize the discussion to secure a meeting with the client. However, if you do not want to provide a customized call experience, you can probably look for packages without this feature.

CRM Integration

CRM integration is useful because your client directory will be updated each time you receive a call through the call tracking software. This feature has less use for lawyers than salespeople, but it can still eliminate the burden on your staff to create a call log and a client contact record for each prospect.

Voice over IP (VoIP)

Call tracking software can take advantage of VoIP to free up your landlines or integrate with your existing VoIP service.

Intelligent Call Routing

Intelligent call routing analyzes how the prospective client reached your firm and routes the call accordingly. For example, if the prospective client reached you through a campaign promoting your firm’s bankruptcy practice, the software can route the call to a legal secretary in the bankruptcy department.

Ease of Use

Software should be easy to use and have an intuitive dashboard. But “ease” depends on your firm. If you run a solo practice, you need something you can use without taking time away from your legal responsibilities. Anything that requires training or forces you to dig for information will probably not work for your practice. But if you work for a firm with a dedicated marketing team inside or outside of your firm, you may have more flexibility in the software you choose. Your marketing professionals have both the time and expertise to use more complex software packages.

Evaluating Call Tracking Software for Lawyers

Most of the call tracking software vendors provide demonstrations or consultations with a sales representative. Although these meetings will likely include a sales pitch, you can see the software in action and discuss your law firm’s needs. You can also use some of these software packages for free during a trial period. This will help you determine whether call tracking software will help you market your firm. It will also give you a chance to test drive the software to evaluate its ease of use. Call tracking software can help you optimize your marketing efforts. By adding call tracking to your firm’s marketing analytics, you can see exactly what works for your firm and focus your efforts there. Choosing a call tracking software is an important step in optimizing your digital marketing efforts, converting leads into signed clients, and ultimately growing your law firm. LawRank can help. Contact us today to learn more about call tracking, SEO for your law firm, and how our digital marketing efforts can help you dominate your market.   About the author: LawRank™ was founded with one goal in mind – to get attorneys on Google’s first page. Our co-founder and SEO expert is Mariano Rodriguez, a graduate of UCLA School of Law.