If your patients are picking up the phone to make appointments, then every missed or mismanaged call is a missed opportunity. Call tracking for healthcare providers bridges the gap between your digital marketing and actual patient conversions. It gives you full visibility into where your calls are coming from, how those callers are interacting with your website or ads before they call, and how your team is handling those calls once they come in. The goal? To drive more high-quality calls, improve the patient experience, and optimize every part of your marketing funnel that leads to the phone ringing.
The Basics of Call Tracking
You already monitor your website traffic, ad clicks, and form fills, but if calls are how your patients convert, then not tracking them means you’re missing the most valuable data point. Call tracking gives you the last mile view of the patient journey. It lets you see what channel brought them in, what content they engaged with, and what finally prompted them to pick up the phone.
Knowing whether someone called after seeing a Google ad, reading a blog post, or landing on your homepage is key. It tells you where to double down, what’s working, and what’s just burning budget.
Beyond just call sources, call tracking also helps you:
- The cost of customer acquisition and how to reduce it
- The average length of each phone call
- Number of phone calls received each day
- Which time of day you have the highest call volume
- Quality of customer service and how to improve it
- Detailed buyer insights about the patient journey and how to optimize it
- How phone calls are driving revenue
- User behavior patterns and trends
- How users and traffic respond to call ads and website phone numbers
Types of Call Tracking
The two primary types of call tracking are known as dynamic call tracking and call number tracking. Dynamic call tracking assigns unique phone numbers to each and every person who visits the website using a code on the site. When a person makes a phone call, dynamic call tracking allows marketers to track everything they did on your website before calling you. There are two categories of dynamic call tracking: channel-based tracking and dynamic number insertion (DNI).
Channel-based tracking assigns unique phone numbers to each marketing channel that is outside of your website. Using this method, for example, you’ll use different phone numbers for organic traffic, paid traffic, and social media traffic. DNI, on the other hand, automatically swaps the phone number on your website with unique tracking codes that are used to follow and examine user sessions and behaviors. The DNI call tracking method will provide you with information like the page they called you from, their marketing source, device type, and location.
Call number tracking, on the other hand, uniques unique phone numbers in both on and offline ads, such as in email marketing, print advertising, and snail-mail. These unique phone numbers allow you to understand where your phone calls come from, but don’t provide you with as much comprehensive and detailed information as dynamic call tracking methods do.
Popular Call Tracking Vendors
There are many different call tracking vendors out there, and in the next section, we’ll discuss what to look for when finding a call tracking for healthcare providers. A few of the most popular and well-known call tracking vendors are:
- CallRail – software that tracks and analyzes phone calls and web forms. It is also able to integrate with most existing marketing and CRM programs.
- DialogTech – provides call tracking and marketing analytics for inbound phone calls. This is a great option if you don’t have an existing marketing and CRM program.
- Hubspot – offers free CRM and sales suites that have a call tracking feature that will log your calls and generate customizable reports.
- Infinity – a cloud-based call tracking platform that is best suited for small businesses that are looking to scale up their business or open new locations.
- Call Tracking Metrics – A strong tool with HIPAA-compliant options, IVR features, dynamic number insertion (DNI), and advanced call routing—designed with healthcare in mind.
How to Choose a Call Tracking Solution for Your Healthcare Company
Every call tracking software is different and offers unique customer packages, so you’ll need to take a look at the different packages, prices, and offerings to decide which is best for your business plan. In addition, this software can be complex, consisting of detailed user dashboards, call recording, and more, so you’ll want to make sure the vendor you choose has everything you need to be successful, laid out in a way you can easily understand. Here are a few important capabilities that you should consider when trying to choose the right call tracking software for your healthcare organization.
Collect Real-Time Data on Caller Profiles
Your call tracking software should help make your team more helpful and effective over the phone. In order to do so, you need call tracking software that gathers accurate information about each caller in real-time. Gathering real-time data on callers’ information, while they’re on the phone with a representative, can help make your services more personalized.
Some of the data collected for each caller’s profile include their location, demographic, user behavior on your website, and any previous history they have with your site. The more information you know about your caller in real-time, the more effective your representatives will be on the phone and more likely your caller will turn into a real conversion.
Make Use of Interactive Voice Response (IVR)
If you’ve ever contacted your health insurance company or doctor’s office and were brought to a recorded line with pre-programmed options such as “press one for office hours” or “enter your customer ID followed by the pound sign,” you’ve interacted with IVR software. Also referred to as “intelligent call routing,” IVR is an automated software that accepts caller input, either by voice or by touch, in response to pre-recorded prompts, to help connect them to the right department.
Many call tracking programs offer their own IVR systems. However, if you already have an existing IVR set up, you’ll want to make sure the software you choose will integrate with your existing system. Each interaction you track with your IVR provides you with useful data about why people are calling you and what information they are looking for.
Call Recording, Keyword Analytics, and Reporting Tools
Every call tracking program has a user dashboard with reporting tools and analytics. You can use these tools to track user behavior over time, identify which keywords are driving phone calls, see what your return on investment (ROI) is, and determine how you can improve your content, landing pages, and conversion funnels to earn more phone calls.
Another way to analyze your phone calls is through call recording. Although software reporting suites can gather a large volume of information about phone calls and user data, manual phone call analysis is key to improving patient experience. By recording and analyzing your phone calls, you may be able to identify key phrases or questions that you aren’t already marketing towards. Call recording can also help you spot possible issues in the way your phone calls are handled so you can take steps towards improvement and evaluate which calls result in an appointment and which ones don’t. This way, you can spot trends in your callers, learn more about your audience, and optimize your marketing strategy accordingly.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Integration
When choosing a call tracking for healthcare providers, it’s important that you make sure it will integrate seamlessly with your existing CRM program. This information is needed to collect and keep track of customer information and potential leads from the initial point of contact to their first appointment and beyond. If you don’t already have your own CRM set up, you’ll want to purchase call tracking software that has its own CRM system that you can use.
Connect Your Call Tracking Software to Your Web Analytics Tools
Once you’ve chosen a call tracking vendor, you’ll want to integrate your existing analytics tools with your call tracking software. By doing so, you’ll be able to see the entire patient journey – from the way they found your website to the moment they schedule their appointment. If you invest a lot of time and effort into your healthcare marketing strategy, but have no way to analyze, track, record, and respond to your phone calls, a lot of potential patients are going to slip through the cracks. When you integrate everything together, you close an important gap that many healthcare marketers fail to fill.
Patients tend to do a lot of research before choosing a healthcare provider. They might ask for recommendations on Facebook, perform a search on Google, read patient reviews on review websites, and even visit a provider’s social media platforms. When you know exactly how users are finding you online and where they are calling from, you can identify the most profitable marketing channels and focus your marketing efforts on optimizing the channels that are more likely to bring you phone calls and conversions. In order to understand this user behavior, you have to look at your web analytics as a whole, including your organic search traffic, PPC and Facebook Ads, Google My Business listing, and call tracking.
Call Tracking for Healthcare Providers That Actually Drives Admissions
Call tracking is one of the most overlooked tools in healthcare marketing, and one of the most powerful. It connects your ad spend to real phone calls, helps you understand which campaigns are driving results, and gives your team the data they need to convert more leads into patients. But getting it right takes more than just picking a platform. It’s about integrating your tools, aligning your team, and using the data strategically.
That’s where we come in.
At Stodzy, we build full-funnel marketing systems that include call tracking for healthcare providers, web analytics, and CRM integration, so nothing falls through the cracks. We’ll handle the setup, reporting, and optimization. You handle the patients. Let’s talk about how we can get your phone ringing for the right reasons.