Following on from the problems highlighted here: The dirty secret of online marketing – let’s take a look at some of the challenges around properly measuring lead sources when the customer calls you.
Unless your website doesn’t have a phone number on it, some of the visitors to the site will call. To make this very clear, if you are not able to measure inbound calls and attribute them into your reporting on campaign effectiveness you will have flawed data. Bad data almost always leads to bad decision-making.
Here is an extreme example:
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Campaign 1 : Contextual advertising on your favourite search engine: eCPC €1, click-to-lead 1%, cost-per-lead = €100
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Campaign 2 : Display advertising on your favourite expat website: eCPC €3, click-to-lead 3%, cost-per-lead = €100
Same value for money. But if the higher click-to-lead from Campaign 2 also transfers to inbound calls and half of the visitors call, the math quickly changes:
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Campaign 1 : Contextual advertising on your favourite search engine: eCPC €1, click-to-lead 1%, click-to-call 1%, cost-per-lead = €50
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Campaign 2 : Display advertising on your favourite expat website: eCPC €3, click-to-lead 3%, click-to-call 3%, cost-per-lead = €33
I wrote ‘extreme example’ before, but we have seen real-world cases where improvements in inbound call measurement meant that advertisers had to completely re-evaluate their spend based on real data. The major risk in an unmeasured environment is that the inbound call performance is attributed to all marketing activity based on the spend or impressions. This can present a completely false picture.
I convinced you this is important?
How to fix the problem? The bad news is that the only way to really get 100% on this is hard.
The easiest and most common way to try and do attribution for an inbound call is to ask “where did you hear about us?” In some cases, a caller will be able to identify the exact source and the person receiving the call will log this correctly.
You want some scary data? Some websites have a “How did you hear about us?” drop-down menu on their contact form – studies have shown that up to 90% of respondents choose the first one in the list (even when this is rotated randomly).
A person receiving calls is usually paid or evaluated on results, so attribution is the last thing on their minds (and call-centre data follows user data – it doesn’t matter what the first option is, it automatically becomes the most popular).
The inbound caller really doesn’t care about identifying this as they are just trying to get a price or buy something. In addition, most people have a lot of difficulty actually answering the question. If I use Google to search for the best solution for my car insurance in Singapore, find a webpage about car insurance in Singapore and call the provider on the page, then get asked “how did you find us?” , the answer in my mind may very well be Google or “on the Internet” or “your website” . None of which might be the real reason you got a call.
Doing it properly
To ensure coherent and accurate tracking of the performance of online marketing spend you need to be able to track inbound calls properly. This means doing the following:
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For the call-centre you need to establish a series of different phone numbers from which you can pull a report to see the number of inbound calls to each number.
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On your site you need to push a permanent cookie onto the visitor’s machine which identifies the source of the click when it arrives from a campaign.
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You then need to modify your website to serve a different phone number depending on the click source in the cookie.
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When people call you will now know which slice of your budget generated each call.
Bingo!
Without this kind of marketing intelligence you could end up spending more on the cheapest impressions you can find as this ‘makes sense’. With it, you could get an ugly surprise which means they really don’t make sense any more. It might mean that several marketing options with the same price and ‘results’ suddenly don’t look the same.
Budgets for marketing are always under pressure from the ‘business’ or ‘management’. When times are tough, marketeers are forced again and again to justify their spend. You want to survive and profit? Consider why a small investment based on the points above could save a lot of money next month, year and beyond. If you want to know where to cut spend, it could be the most important thing you can do to make that happen without strangling your business by making the wrong decisions.
Why expat advertisers feel this pain hardest
Expat categories: IPMI, international banking, relocation, schools, property: skew toward high-involvement research and phone closing. Buyers compare plans across time zones, then call an advisor who can explain network hospitals or admission rules. HSBC Expat Explorer-type content journeys often end in human conversation. UN/OECD-scale mobile populations mean multi-country numbers, WhatsApp callbacks, and call centres that span languages. If those conversations are unattributed, your “digital” ROI report is fiction.
Younger assignees may prefer chat; families and corporate buyers still call. Measure both.
Illustrative CPL distortion without call tracking
| Campaign (illustrative) | Form CPL | Call rate | True blended CPL | Decision without calls |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Brand search | €80 | High | €45 | Looks expensive |
| Expat display | €80 | Very high | €35 | Looks equal to search |
| Cheap prospecting | €60 | Near zero | €58 | Looks like a win |
| Native education | €110 | Medium | €70 | Cut too early |
Illustrative numbers to show ranking risk: replace with your data after instrumentation.
Self-reported attribution is not a strategy
“How did you hear about us?” fails because memory is blurry, agents are incentivised on close rate not data quality, and dropdowns bias to the first item. Use the question as a soft qualitative signal if you must: never as the system of record for budget allocation.
Dynamic number insertion (DNI) and pool management
Proper setup in industry practice usually includes:
- Number pools large enough for concurrent visitors per source.
- Session cookies / first-party storage capturing UTM, gclid, publisher IDs.
- DNI swapping visible numbers (and click-to-call on mobile).
- Call analytics recording duration, answer rate, and CRM disposition.
- Offline conversion upload back to Google Ads and other platforms where policy allows.
- Privacy compliance, disclose call recording, respect consent, minimise retention.
Static unique numbers per campaign can work at small scale; DNI scales better for many campaigns and organic vs paid splits.
Illustrative implementation layers
| Layer | Purpose | Owner |
|---|---|---|
| Ad UTMs + click IDs | Source truth on arrival | Media team |
| Cookie / first-party ID | Persist source | Web / engineering |
| Number pool + DNI | Visible attribution | Martech |
| Call tracking PBX | Connect call to ID | Ops / telco |
| CRM + BI | Revenue by source | Sales ops |
| Bid platforms | Optimise to calls/sales | Media team |
Illustrative RACI-style view for project planning.
Edge cases for international businesses
- WhatsApp and WeChat, treat messaging as another conversional channel with deep links or unique handles per campaign where feasible.
- Shared destination numbers, do not print one global number on every brochure and expect digital attribution.
- Multi-language IVR, tag language selection as a quality signal.
- VPN traffic, geo of IP may not equal buyer home; rely on campaign tags more than IP alone.
- Agency call centres, contractually require source logging from tracking numbers, not vibes.
Governance and decision-making
Review blended CPL and cost per qualified call weekly for the first month after launch. Expect rankings of publishers and keywords to change. Protect brand search even if form CPL looks high: calls may carry disproportionate revenue. Cut cheap ambient display that produces neither forms nor calls. Present leadership with before/after dashboards so marketing can defend spend with evidence.
A 30-day rollout plan
Week 1: Audit current numbers on site, ads, PDFs, and partner pages.
Week 2: Procure tracking, define pool size, map CRM fields.
Week 3: Implement DNI on key templates; QA mobile click-to-call.
Week 4: Train agents; turn on reporting; pause decisions until two weeks of clean data accumulate.
Measuring inbound calls from online campaigns is unglamorous infrastructure, and one of the highest-ROI fixes an expat advertiser can make. Without it you will mis-rank channels, overfund vanity inventory, and underfund the placements that actually make the phone ring.
If you need help designing call attribution for multi-market expat campaigns, get started or contact our team.
