Dynamic Number Insertion (DNI) Overview

Click, click, click… Call!

Ultimately, understanding both click and phone call traffic tied to customer purchases is what determines campaign success. The ability to link the first click through to the call and finally to the purchase is part of a winning marketer’s secret sauce.

One of the key ingredients to accomplishing this data connection is Call Tracking. Like most ingredients, to build a masterpiece, you need to start with a killer base. In this article, the base, our white sauce or Béchamel is a phone number technology called Dynamic Number Insertion or DNI for short.

Regardless of your campaign origin, be it Google Ads, Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, Bing, or any other source, marketers instantly increase their effectiveness by connecting the user to their activities.

To peel back the onion, applying Dynamic Number Insertion (DNI) correctly to your tracking numbers helps you see the customer journey from end-to-end. Ultimately, the goal is to understand the path the customer took before making the call in order to understand what marketing mix component(s) drove the most valuable inbound calls.

The opposite is also true. What if we have great marketing initiatives driving a ton of traffic, but none of those users buy anything?

Connecting calls to traffic is an often overlooked and critical ingredient of effective marketing. We often see statistics about how effective inbound marketing is and how an inbound lead is 10x more valuable than cold calling. But what you may not know is that an inbound phone call is 7x more valuable than web leads.

Here’s why – when customers call you they have already been doing research, and either want something immediately or are looking for high ticket items. Either way, you want more of those calls.

From this perspective, it’s shocking how much time and effort we as marketers put into tracking all our web traffic and often ignore the most valuable lead sources. The ones driving inbound calls.

Dynamic Phone Numbers @ Work

Let’s say you get a visitor to your website named John. John has been scouring the internet trying to find what you offer. He’s looking for fast cars, and you sell a lot of them.

He searches on Google for your long tail keyword, “budget fast cars.”

He finds your blog post, “Top 10 Budget Fast Cars”.

The first time John visits your web page a pre-installed bit of JavaScript runs and captures information from the referring webpage, in this case Google. Then a specific, unique dynamic phone number tied to the referring webpage and your search term, “budget fast cars” automatically presents to the user.

It’s that easy, and your hard work to get him to your page has finally paid off.

Now after John reads the post, he starts looking for cars that you sell. John finds the best fast car for him and calls you on the dynamic number that’s been following him on your web pages.

If he comes back tomorrow, guess what, a dynamic phone number is again presented to John. And again we can understand where John is coming from and which keywords he’s using to find our fast cars website.

All this tracking enhances our ability to improve and drive conversions from friends like John.

How flexible are Dynamic Phone Numbers?

A solid phone call tracking platform, like Convirza, allows users to display different or dynamic phone numbers in a variety of ways. The 3 most common are by browser session, referring source, or a specific web URL.

This simple yet robust approach enables online marketers to attribute offline phone conversions to specific online campaigns and powerfully measure marketing ROI.

Digging Deeper into the 3 Dynamic Number Insertion Varieties

Let’s look at your recipe and figure out how to apply Dynamic Number Insertion to work best for you. As noted, you can leverage DNI in a variety of ways to build your succulent sauce. Let’s explore each method at a high-level so you can better understand how to select the right DNI mixture for you.

Web page or URL Dynamic Number Insertion

Marketers can assign unique dynamic phone numbers to specific websites or URLs. As a visitor clicks from a specific page, an individual phone number will be generated matching the source page to the number. This allows marketers to measure click through activity on different pages to focus on specific call conversions, then tracked and measured via corresponding reports.

RECOMMENDED USES

• Organizations that leverage this feature often use this kind of URL Dynamic Number Insertion to track social media and email campaigns.
• Marketers can easily track the effectiveness of specific links and ads as well as email campaigns.
• Applying this strategy involves assigning a unique phone number to each social media campaign or email campaign.

This straightforward approach allows you to track visitors from each referring source URL. This also ensures that they will see the unique tracking phone number associated with that source.

Source-based Dynamic Number Insertion

If you are generating a low volume of traffic and looking to gather high-level data about a few specific referring sources of traffic and calls, then source-based DNI is the way to go. Marketers can assign a single phone number to measure all visitors coming from targeted referring sites.

Here, every visitor from the same source would see the same unique DNI number associated with that source.

In this example, we assign dynamic phone numbers to Google both organic and paid search. Also, dynamic phone numbers work with social media.