CallRail Review: The Complete Review

CallRail is phone software built for the modern marketer.

This powerful call-tracking tool tells you exactly which marketing activity led to which incoming call.

No more guessing.

CallRail provides tons of informative metrics on various aspects of phone interactions.

But CallRail goes beyond call tracking. It also manages call routing, lead scoring, transcriptions and a lot more.

Conversation intelligence is how they put it – and they don’t mean sounding smart at a party. It’s powerful, automated, smart call analytics.

Where CallRail also gets it right is the user experience. The dashboards are simple and intuitive while still providing the sophisticated tech and analytics that data-driven marketers need.

That’s why CallRail is the exclusive Call Tracking software of Online Geniuses (sponsor).

Why use CallRail? (or the problem CallRail Solves)

Traditionally, companies use the same one phone number on all their marketing communications: website, online ads, billboards, etc.

The problem is when a call comes in, nobody knows which marketing channel or campaign prompted that call. Did they hear of the company through Yelp, an organic Facebook post, in a marketing email, or from the top of a Taxi?

CallRail tells companies which marketing campaign generated which call by cleverly showing different phone numbers in different ads.

Attribution is a hugely important concept in marketing these days. CallRail helps you significantly improve attribution. This improvement allows you to allocate marketing spend more effectively to higher ROI channels. If your competitor is using call tracking and you aren’t, well, you are at a disadvantage.

What is Call Tracking?

Call tracking creates multiple, unique phone numbers so you can display different phone numbers on different marketing communications: each channel, campaign or even ad. All those different numbers then can forward to your main number. So your company can answer calls the same way, on the same phones like they are used to – no additional hardware is necessary.

The benefit is now you have crucial intelligence highlighting which marketing campaigns worked (and which didn’t).

Who is CallRail for (customer demographics)?

CallRail is really for any company that uses phone numbers in their marketing

• Marketing agencies
• SMB (small to medium businesses) that advertise with a phone number
• Enterprise companies with higher-volume campaigns
• Data-driven marketers of all stripes

While CallRail is powerful enough to use at an enterprise company, the price point and ease of use is approachable for any SMB. Plans start at $30 a month and setup literally takes minutes (see pricing here).

CallRail doesn’t require any special training, equipment, or up-front investment. You don’t even need a credit card to start a free trial (yay!)

Common uses of CallRail/Industry Examples

Use CallRail numbers on any advertisements or marketing communications with phone numbers:

• Google AdWords ad extensions
• Offline: Billboards, newspaper, business cards
• Your Website – CallRail can display different numbers dynamically based on the traffic source

There are many other uses of CallRail outside of call-tracking that we will cover: Call routing, Business SMS (texts), and automated call scoring to name a few

How Does CallRail Work?

CallRail Setup

Set up is simple. Just start a free trial and enter your email, password, name, phone number and company name.

It’s a SaaS tool, so functionality and analytics can be accessed via a browser or app.

There is a clear Get Started box welcoming you.

Upon signing up you are prompted to do three things:

• Set Up a Call Flow
• Set Up Notifications
• Integrate Google Analytics

You can port any number you own into CallRail. There are no setup fees, no contracts, and no hardware needed.

To add a tracking number: you follow a wizard with about 5 questions. CallRail has several wizards to make setup easy. The wizards are intuitive and let you can move back and forth in the process.

Once done, you will instantly have a new phone number ready to use.

You can choose a local phone number that matches your area code, choose another area code, or use toll-free numbers for an extra $2 per month.

All local numbers are SMS-enabled to allow for tracked text conversations. CallRail even provides form-tracking and analytics around that.

Testing it out

I made a test call, hung up and refreshed the screen a few seconds later. The information was updated instantaneously. Nice!

Track calls from your website (Dynamic Number Insertion)

You can dynamically display the phone number of your website based on where a visitor came from (like Google Adwords, for example). This simply requires adding a small snippet of JavaScript (similar to installing Google Analytics or the Facebook pixel)

Just to reiterate how cool Dynamic Number Insertion is, CallRail actually swaps the phone number listed on your website based on where the user found you.

A walkthrough of CallRail

Layout/Overview of CallRail Interface

CallRail has five sections:

• Activity
• Reports
• Numbers
• Settings
• Lead Center

Activity section of CallRail

The CallRail activity section is the main screen of the dashboard and where you can find a log of calls, callers, voicemails and texts.

Take advantage of the powerful filters to drill into on almost any facet you could think of: date, source, tag, or CallScore to name a few. You can also save filters for easy future use.

Available fields to filter by include:

• Data range
• Number
• Source
• Direction (inbound/outbound)
• Answer Status
• Duration
• Agent
• CallScore
• Tag
• First-time conversation
• Device type
• Keyword
• Campaign
• Landing
• Referrer

There is a helpful search box if you want to search a particular person or company from a large list of results.

Like almost all screens, you can export this information to a CSV file.

Reports section of CallRail

The Reports section features a collection of visualizations to gain insight on the most important call metrics.

This section is organized by which channel or customer interaction: call, text, or form.

CallRail’s signature balance of ease-of-use and control is on display in this section. The tool is flexible enough to pull up almost any metric while still being intuitive and visually appealing.

You can view the following:

• Call metrics via source, campaign, keyword and more
• Lead Funnel – funnel metrics on how many calls became leads
• Usage by number
• Usage by company
• Calls by Agent – view inbound and outbound calls by agent
• Calls by Day & Time
• Keywords Spotted (more on this below)

In this section, there is a funnel visualization called Lead Funnel. It seems to only have two options: whether a call became a lead or not. We would have liked more stages for the Lead Funnel like Proposal, Closed – Win, etc. Yes, most people will keep track of this in their CRM that CallRail probably integrates with, but it would be nice to have that here as well.

We really like the Calls by Day & Time visualization which, as it sounds like, visualizes the calls received or made over the week. It’s a very intuitive graphic that can inform customer behavior patterns and resource allocation.

Keywords Spotted

One innovative feature is Keywords Spotted. If you have recordings and transcriptions activated, this feature will look in the call transcription text of recorded calls for any keywords you are tracking. For example, you can log all calls in which the phrase “proposal” was spoken. These calls can be tagged so you can analyze them separately. Tagged calls will also have other call metrics like duration, source, etc.

Numbers section of CallRail

The Numbers section is the place to manage all your call tracking phone numbers you setup. You can also create new phone numbers here as well.

Call Flow

In the Numbers section, you can also set up a new call flow. This is the routing sequence that your call will follow.

Options include:

• Greeting: play a greeting to the caller
• Dial: Forward the call to a phone number
• Simulcall: Ring multiple phones at once
• Round Robin: evenly distribute calls to a team
• Menu: build an interactive phone menu
• Schedule: Define routing based on time-of-day
• Geo-routing: Route based on caller’s location
• Responsive routing: Route based on custom criteria
• Tag: Change a call’s tag
• Voicemail: Send the call to Voicemail
• Hang up: End the call

Call routing through Call Flow can be as simple or complex as you want. You can mix and match these options into a sequence that makes sense for your company and customers. For example, Greeting > SimulCall > Voicemail.

CallRail’s Settings Section

Settings is where you can set up integrations as well as CallScore, CallScribe, and Keyword Spotting.

CallRail Integrations

The nice part about working with an industry-leading software such as CallRail is every tool wants to integrate with them. This results in lots of third-party integrations. They connect and integrate with several other tools which is crucial when setting up your marketing technology stack and analyzing data.

Current official integrations include

• Acquisio
• Bing Ads
• Custom Cookie Capture
• Dynamic Number Insertion
• Facebook
• Google AdWords
• Google Analytics
• HipChat
• Hubspot
• Kenshoo
• Kissmetrics
• Marin Software
• Marketo
• Mixpanel
• Optimizely
• PipelineDeals
• Salesforce
• Slack
• Unbounce
• VWO
• Webhooks
• WordPress

CallScore

CallScore is automated lead classification. If you are familiar with sales, you know that the logistics of paperwork – logging calls, writing notes, and keeping your pipeline up-to-date – takes a lot of time. Often more time than the actual sales calls. CallScore aims to reduce that time and make you more efficient. CallScore will automatically score or rate calls based on machine learning and rules you set. For examples, all calls over 5 minutes that come from a certain source could be scored as good leads. You can even use this as a criterion to determine which leads get pushed to your CRM. This decreases the amount of junk in your CRM so you can be efficient about your business.

CallScribe

Yes, CallScribe transcribes calls so you have a full transcript of your calls. But it does more than that. It also gives you a visual map of the call that you can click on to jump back and forth through important parts of a call. You need to enable recordings to utilize CallScribe. In turn, CallScribe is needed for the Keywords Spotted feature. CallScribe is an additional add-on.

Lead Center

CallRail has a cool section they call Lead Center. Lead Center is live dashboard of recent calls. I think of it like a mini-CRM or caller ID on steroids. It holds all the contacts you have phone interactions with along with more information.

You can even make outbound calls using the Softphone in Lead Center to call back prospects. And since all local numbers are SMS-enabled, you can text them back from Lead Center.

We are not sure why Lead Center is in a separate section of website and not just another tab of the main dashboard.

Features we love

Variety of phone numbers

Local numbers, US & Canadian Numbers, 888, 877, & 866 Toll Free Numbers. Who knew there were so many phone numbers available?

SMS for Business

All local numbers are SMS-enabled. So you can measure attribution from text interactions, track them in CallRail, and even respond in Lead Center.

Keyword-Level Tracking

Not only will you be able to know someone found you via AdWords or organic search, you will be able to track it back further to the search term they entered that started it all. Advanced marketing!

Custom Call Routing

Build a sequence of events that callers go through. For example, does the call go to a single person then voicemail, an automated message followed by a menu, a group of people simulataneously, etc?

Dynamic number insertion

Integrate call tracking into your website. Based on the source of a call (Google, Facebook, Yelp, etc) the customer-facing phone number on your site will automatically change so you can track!

Real-Time Call Statistics

There is no lag between phone call activity and getting stats and analytics. Get off the phone and the data is already in the dashboard for your review.

Automated Call Scoring

CallRail uses a sophisticated mix of machine learning and rules to automatically score and classify leads which is very effective.

Whisper messages

Whisper messages quietly tell you (not the caller) the call source or a message to let the caller know the call is being recorded if you want.

Email Call Notifications

Create custom notifications for calls that only fit your most important criteria. Alerts can be sent via email or desktop notifications.

Integrations with Google Analytics and AdWords

CallRail is seamlessly integrated with the key Google tandem of Google Analytics and AdWords allowing you to track activity from search engines to your website to your incoming calls.

API & Webhooks

Don’t see an integration you need. Chances are you could build it using the API and Webhooks if you really have the desire.

Call Recording

CallRail has the ability to record calls (but make sure to check legality first as certain jurisdictions don’t like this)

Call Transcription

Really who has time to take notes anymore?

Powerful Filters

After amassing lots of call data, you want to be able to slice and dice it at will. CallRail’s powerful filters, date pickers, and results search let you do just that.

Call Blocking

‘Nuff Said

WordPress Plugin

Easily install the CallRail WordPress plugin for dynamic number insertion in lieu of adding the Javascript code directly on your site. Up to you.

Easy Data Export

Sometimes you just need to run the numbers in a spreadsheet or transport elsewhere. No problem. Easy CSV exports are available for almost any metric.

Areas of improvement

• The caller ID location seems to be based on area code and not actually location – probably the same with other call tracking tools
• Lead Funnel only has 2 stages – prospects and leads. Would be nice if there were more bottom of the funnel stages like proposal and closed-win.
• Forms tracking seems like a random feature not related to call tracking at all.
• Lead Center could be better integrated into the main screens of the dashboard instead of being relegated to a different area of the tool

CallRail pricing plans: how much does CallRail cost?

CallRail has competitive pricing. It is based on pay-for-usage. All core features are included in each plan, including the starter plan which is $30/month.

CallRail also has a 14-day free trial, no credit card needed.

Conclusion

CallRail is the industry-leading call tracking software for a reason. Online Geniuses is pumped to have their sponsorship as our exclusive call-tracking partner.

CallRail has a powerful feature set wrapped in an easy-to-use and visually-pleasing user interface. The analytics and metrics will please any data-driven marketer. The price points are reasonable for any size business. Setup is easy and risk-free. Support and on-boarding was on point. Really there is no reason you shouldn’t take a serious look at CallRail for your call tracking needs.