I’ve been using call tracking numbers for a few years now to track my advertising results. Like anything there is a learning curve of course, and also with practice and experience we get better with something over time. This is true with call tracking also. The first couple of years I would remember to log onto my call tracking account every once in awhile. Now even if I get behind, I will eventually get caught up before I meet with my advertising reps to renew my advertising. These reps are familiar with call tracking numbers and would like to equate calls generated with advertising success. Well one does not equal the other. Before I meet with my rep I want to go through my call tracking to identify every call; whether it was a sales call, a wrong number, a hang up, a repeat call or a lead. Leads are what counts, everything else is filler. I recently met with my Dex rep, which is the main book in our area. Well because it is the main book, a lot of sales people use it as their prospecting list source. “They bought advertising from Dex, they are a good prospect for my advertising product.” I have several different call tracking numbers in this book for our different adds. All of the call tracking numbers had a large number of sales calls. One of the numbers;  65% of the calls were sales calls or solicitations. By the time I added in the wrong numbers, hang ups, and repeat callers only 8% percent of the total calls were actual leads. Calls do not equal leads, and it requires call tracking to know the difference. And this type of knowledge is golden, it’s empowering. I was in the drivers seat. I got the advertising package I wanted at my price, not the price they had in mind. I know what my exact cost per lead was, and this next year we will use call tracking to measure our results again. No guessing, just tracking and measuring. In this book alone I will save $4800 over the next year, from the amount the phone book company wanted me to renew at. In this case knowledge was power, and thank you call tracking for the tool to give me the knowledge.