When choosing your marketing analytics tools, you have dozens of companies that claim to offer top-tier services, and inbound call tracking and conversion reporting are no exception. When you look at your choices, start with a basic question — which platform fits best with your company’s goals and the path it needs to take to reach them?
How to evaluate a call tracking solution
While call tracking software does have standard requirements to fit into the category, there are some key differentiators you should look for when evaluating your options.
- Price
- User ratings
- User interface
- Call routing features
- Call recording and conversation intelligence features
- Spam detection
- Ease and sophistication of reporting
To determine which call tracking features are most relevant to your business, consider what the biggest pain points are surrounding an inbound phone call. The most important components of a call tracking service for your business, may be different than those of another.
For example, if your biggest concern is identifying what marketing campaign or marketing channel is bringing in the best leads, attribution reporting and including calls in your conversion tracking should be a major consideration for you while vetting your options.
On the other hand, if call data isn’t as important to you today as routing calls to the right person at the right time, you may want to prioritize call routing features and user interface over reporting.
On the surface, CallRail and CallTrackingMetrics (CTM) both have much to offer no matter what goals you are looking to achieve. But a deeper dive reveals some differences.
Since price is normally at the top of businesses’ lists when vetting new technology, let’s start there.
Cost differences between CallRail and CallTrackingMetrics
At first glance, CTM may seem cheaper in certain price categories, but CallRail’s all-inclusive call tracking and marketing analytics feature set ultimately makes it the better value. Consider the following:
- CTM charges additional monthly fees for phone numbers, call minutes, text messages, form submissions, and more.
- Their flat monthly fee of $39 might sound like a deal, but every tracking number, phone call, and phone minute is billed by usage.
- Essentially, if you were looking to build CallRail’s $45 per month Call Tracking package at CallTrackingMetrics it would cost you more than $87 per month.
- CallRail’s key features — phone call recording, inbound call routing, spam detection, and reporting, among others — are included at no extra cost, but many of CTM’s offerings — spam protection and encrypted dual-channel call recording, for example — have fees attached.
- Your first 5 phone numbers are free with CallRail.
- CallRail’s award-winning Support team has your back (for no extra fee), and it has a larger pool of talent at the ready to help.
These charges add up and often put CTM’s total well above your final CallRail bill. Want to see these numbers for yourself? Check out CTM’s price calculator.
CallRail vs. CallTrackingMetrics
CallRail Packages
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CallTrackingMetrics
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Call Tracking
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Call Tracking + Form Tracking
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Business Plan
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$45 per month
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$95 per month
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$39 per month subscription (usage not included)
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Tie every call and text to the channel, source, or campaign that captures a customer.
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Get call and form tracking for detailed reporting on customer interactions.
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Add-on: Get 1:1 consulting to assist with account setup, and make sure your goals are met.
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Get granular details on your callers with caller ID and call recording capabilities.
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Bring power and flexibility to your analytics with customizable reports.
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Add-on: Project-based consultation, billed at an hourly rate based on your needs.
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Optimize your customer experience with specific call analytics reports and custom call routing.
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Properly allocate your marketing resources with ROI and cost-per-lead reporting.
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Add-on: We offer two dedicated support plans, business hours and 24/7, for high-volume customers.
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Included usage
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- 5 local numbers
- Additional local numbers, $3.00 each
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- 5 local numbers
- Additional local numbers, $3.00 each
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- 0 local numbers
- $2.50/number/month
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- 500 local minutes
- Additional local minutes, $0.05 each
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- 500 local minutes
- Additional local minutes, $0.05 each
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- 0 local minutes
- (call forwarding $0.045/min. OR CTM Softphone $0.038/min.)
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- 100 text messages
- Additional text messages, $0.016 each
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- 100 text messages
- Additional text messages, $0.016 each
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- 0 text messages
- $0.014/text
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- Toll-free numbers, $5.00 each
- Toll-free minutes, $0.08 each
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- Toll-free numbers, $5.00 each
- Toll-free minutes, $0.08 each
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- Toll-free numbers \
$3.50 each
- Toll-free minutes \
(call forwarding \
$0.065/min. OR CTM Softphone $0.058/min.)
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X
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- 1,000 form submissions
- Additional form submissions, \
$0.02 each
- Unlimited custom forms
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X
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User ratings from CallRail and CallTrackingMetrics
In a recent user survey by G2, CallRail surpassed CTM in every category, from setup to ease of use to quality of support and customer service.
Category
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CallRail
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CTM
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Ease of doing business with
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93% ★
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91%
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Ease of use
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92% ★
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86%
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Quality of support
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91% ★
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90%
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Meets requirements
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91% ★
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90%
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Ease of admin
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92% ★
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87%
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Ease of setup
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91% ★
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84%
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Is the product headed in the right direction?
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93% ★
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92%
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CallRail’s rate of positive user feedback far exceeds CTM’s on Capterra, in categories ranging from customer support to ease of use to value for the money. CallRail has more than 100 reviews, the majority of them positive, compared to just 18 for CTM.
And FitSmallBusiness named CallRail its 2019 Best Overall Call Tracking Software for Small Businesses, citing CallRail’s intuitive features, ease of use, and ability to simultaneously manage multiple campaigns. CTM received an honorable mention for Best Call Tracking Service for Call Centers.
"We had been with CallTrackingMetrics before this ... CallRail has a much better interface, and was able to incorporate more relevant data besides just calls."
— Austin Pike, Co-Founder of Earn More Do Less
The difference a strong user interface makes
How many times have you been let down but by a clunky or hard-to-use user interface? When you open your call tracking software to evaluate marketing performance, you’re looking for quick answers and eye-catching visual representations of data to get you up-to-speed as quick as possible.
The same is true when you’re building and integrating campaigns. A complicated UI will only add to the labor involved in creating, managing and monitoring your programs, but CallRail’s simple, powerful UI provides slick, intuitive in-platform tools to manage everything from dynamic number insertion to inbound call triage to keyword performance to conversation and outcome reporting.
A strong UI helps you achieve more in less time, improving your lead engagement over phone calls and on the web.
For example, building call routing should be easy and provide immediate value to your team. CallRail’s built-in call flow templates and easy-to-use interface makes it easy to adopt the software.
CallRail makes it easy with a straightforward, step-by-step form that even beginners can use to set up call routing in the platform:
Call routing is one of many different product features offered by both CallRail and CallTrackingMetrics. Here’s a video of how you set up call routing in CallTrackingMetrics, for comparison.
Product feature highlights from CallRail versus CallTrackingMetrics
Both CallRail and CTM are stacked with features, but once you dive into the details, a variety of factors put CallRail on top.
Spam detection
CallRail’s spam detection capabilities are second to none. Our Anti-Spam Technology offers a three-tiered approach with spam detection, blocking, and prevention of an unwanted phone call. You can be confident that your data is clean and ready for use. And, unlike with CTM, it’s included in the cost.
Call Log
A central Call Log that lets you view your calls in real time, capture caller ID data, and connect your call volume to specific marketing campaigns. Your Call Log is a crucial tool that will be frequently referenced to generate lists of prospects, generate insights based on key inbound call data points, and create reports to improve your understanding of your customers.
Ideally, a Call Log should offer easy-to-read visualizations of this data and customer information. But as illustrated in this screenshot from CallTrackingMetrics, our rival platform displays this information in a chaotic format that requires close study to navigate:
Compare that Call Log interface with the clean, organized Call Log offered through CallRail, which makes both call data and individual customer information easy to find:
Even if you do need support to understand and fully use CallRail’s platform, we offer succinct tutorials that combine simple navigation and step-by-step guidance with plain language to ensure you’re able to quickly add a new skill to your toolkit.
Call Flow Builder
Call Flow Builder Templates simplify the often daunting task of routing calls. This tool offers a highly customizable routing system that provides a fully designed customer experience featuring greetings, disclosures about call recordings, and any necessary call routing instructions as the caller is connected with the appropriate tracking number.
Interactive elements, such as self-directed call routing options, can also be into these flows, ensuring that the call tracking platform is succeeding in connecting callers with relevant, available sales personnel. This is a degree of sophistication and customization that CTM doesn’t match today.
Going beyond call tracking
Call tracking tools aren’t all that’s offered through CallRail. When you’re ready to grow beyond basic call tracking and explore the possibilities of deeper analytics and insights, CallRail clients have a number of tools at their disposal.
Lead Center
CallRail’s Lead Center consolidates incoming leads from calls, texts, forms, and chat alongside one another, while also managing outbound calls, text, and chat messages directly from the CallRail platform.
By centralizing these activities in the same place as your lead information, CallRail can become an all-in-one communications hub that manages inbound and outbound communications alongside lead management activities.
Conversation Intelligence
With Conversation Intelligence, your business can automate transcription and analysis of all of your phone calls to better understand the context of each conversation—without having to listen to the call itself.
Call Highlights is one component of the Conversation Intelligence feature that analyzes call content to identify keywords and phrases that align with your business and marketing goals. including lead source, competitor names, or plan comparison. Automation Rules is another tool that identifies terms frequently used by your customers that may offer value to your search marketing strategy and product messaging. CTM’s keyword functionality, by contrast, contains a smaller pool of words, which can lead to misattributions of data.
The insights from call intelligence can be used to improve your marketing strategy, train sales team members, identify emerging trends that marketing can target, or to simply monitor for quality assurance.
Form Tracking
Just like call tracking is used to track phone calls, Form Tracking uses a single line of code to track submissions and connect them to the referring marketing channel. This improves marketing attribution capabilities while collecting much of the same lead gen data that your business uses to track and evaluate inbound call activity.
Market share of CallRail versus CallTrackingMetrics
Market share data shows that CallRail maintains a clear lead over CallTrackingMetrics when it comes to both domestic and global market share:
With a larger market share and stronger growth capabilities, businesses shopping for a call tracking solution can have confidence in CallRail’s ability to facilitate growth for its clients, maintain support even as your company scales and ensure quality assurance standards even with a high volume of clients.
When it comes to investing into marketing software, there’s safety in numbers. Plus, the increased market share and stronger incoming revenue supports faster innovation on CallRail’s development side, which gives your business faster access to new and improved products.
An Inc. 500 Company
In addition to receiving its fifth straight selection to the Inc. 500 list, CallRail was also distinguished as one of the Inc. Best Places to Work in 2018, 2019, and 2021.
Over the past three years, Inc. cites CallRail as achieving 181 percent growth—a strong number that underscores our sustained success and customer satisfaction. CTM, by contrast, has achieved three-year growth of 98 percent, per the same calculation.
The inclusive, intuitive choice
When placed side by side, CallRail stands out as the ideal choice for companies like yours that are ready to grow. Whether you prioritize digital marketing or print, our sizable market presence, inclusive pricing, comprehensive features, and unparalleled support team give you the tool kit you need to harness the power of the phone.
Are you ready to take your marketing game to the next level? Sign up for a free trial today.
Power Up
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Included withCall Tracking
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When you addConversation Intelligence
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When you addForm Tracking
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Communication
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Call notifications
Inbound call recording
Call scoring
Call forwarding
Call flow builder
Voicemail
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Call transcriptions
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Form builder
Connect existing forms on website
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Advanced attribution and analytics
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Online and offline call tracking
Google Analytics and other integrations
Custom call reporting
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AI-powered:
- Call scoring
- Lead tagging
- Call highlights
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Multi-touch attribution
Form tracking
CPL reporting
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