What Is Dynamic Number Insertion (DNI) and How Does It Help Marketing?

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Dynamic number insertion (DNI) is a marketing technology that gives businesses attribution for the phone calls driven from their digital advertising and website. If DNI is new to you, or if you are considering implementing a DNI solution to better measure conversions from your website, read on to learn more.

First, Why Is Tracking Calls from Websites Important to Marketers?

In digital marketing, phone calls can make or break your ROI. This idea, which may have seemed controversial as recently as three years ago, is not in dispute today. Marketers know that, as they shift their digital marketing budget to target consumers on their smartphones, a growing percentage of conversions will come from phone calls:

According to eMarketer, 62.6% of digital ad spending in the US now targets smartphones and mobile devices.
Mobile search, social, and display ads will drive over 108 billion phone calls to US businesses this year, according to analyst firm BIA/Kelsey.
Studies show those calls convert to revenue 10-15 times more than web leads and influenced over $1 trillion in US commerce in 2016.

Calls are an important KPI for measuring digital marketing success. This is especially true for industries like automotive, insurance, financial services, healthcare, travel and hospitality, and others where consumers need to talk to a real person to make an appointment or purchasing decision. Knowing which marketing sources and website interactions generate the most calls and customers is critical to proving and optimizing ROI. And that’s where dynamic number insertion (DNI) comes in.

What Is Dynamic Number Insertion (DNI) and How Does It Work?

Again, dynamic number insertion (DNI) is a marketing analytics technology that enables businesses to get attribution for the phone calls generated from their digital advertising and website. Invoca’s call tracking solution is a popular example of a DNI technology used by marketers.

DNI works by placing a piece of JavaScript code on your website. Whenever someone visits your site, the code dynamically replaces the phone number (or phone numbers, for websites with multiple numbers listed) on each page with a unique trackable phone number (or phone numbers) tied to each visitor, how they found you, and their session. When they call, a call attribution solution like Invoca captures all the attribution and intelligence listed in the section below, connects it with the caller, makes it available for marketers to view via custom reports, and passes it to your other marketing platforms to leverage.

What Is Invoca and What Data Does It Provide Marketers?

Invoca’s call tracking solution is the most sophisticated dynamic number insertion (DNI) technology, used by the world’s biggest brands and digital agencies to track phone calls from website visitors. It captures a wealth of data from website visitors and phone conversations that helps marketers prove and improve conversion rates, customer acquisition, and ROI, including:

Marketing source that drove the website visit: Invoca captures the complete marketing source that drove each caller’s website visit, including the channel, ad variation and placement, ad group and keyword search, email, and much more.
The caller’s path through your website: You can see each caller’s history with your website, including the entry page, all the content they viewed on your site (and for how long), the page they eventually called from, and their interaction with your site after the call.
Caller data: Invoca captures who the caller is, their phone number, their geographic location, the day and time of the call, their browser and OS, and more.
What happened on the call: Invoca also provides conversation intelligence on what occurred on the call, including where it was sent, if it was answered and by whom, how long the call lasted, and what was said in the conversation.
The value of the call: Invoca has sophisticated call scoring technology that can tell you if the call was indeed a “good” sales call based on your business’s definition of a quality lead. And by integrating Invoca with your lead management or CRM system, you can see if callers from each marketing interaction resulted in appointments, sales opportunities, and revenue.

Why Is Invoca the Preferred DNI Solution for Big Brands?

There are many reasons why the world’s biggest brands choose Invoca. But it ultimately boils down to scale: Invoca is the only call attribution platform that can scale to not only capture all the data a big brand requires – but do it affordably. No one else can do either.

Let me elaborate: Big brands in industries like automotive, insurance, finance, travel, retail, healthcare, and telecommunications (to name but a few) have websites that each year can receive millions of visitors and generate hundreds of thousands of phone calls, many going to hundreds (even thousands) of different locations, each with its own phone number listed on the site. Invoca is the only DNI technology sophisticated enough to work for these sites. It has capabilities no one else does, including:

Full attribution for every phone number: Invoca is the only DNI solution to provide complete call attribution data – including the search keywords, digital ads, referring websites, and web sessions that drove the call – for every call to every phone number displayed on a website. This includes “Find a Dealer” and “Find an Agent” webpages that can display dozens of numbers on a single page, both in listings and in maps.
Accurate multi-touch attribution: If a website visitor comes to your website from one digital source (such as a display ad) but does not call, then returns to the site directly a few days later and places a call, only Invoca recognizes the visitor is the same person and attributes the original display ad source information to that call.
Most data from the fewest numbers: DNI relies on pools of phone numbers to attribute calls from digital marketing. The bigger the pool, the more expensive the service. Only Invoca has heartbeat technology that actively monitors each website session for inactivity and quickly returns phone numbers of inactive sessions to your pool for reuse. This enables the biggest brands with millions of visitors to capture complete attribution with the fewest phone numbers and lowest cost.
Sub-domain and cross-domain attribution: For businesses using multiple website domains and sub-domains, Invoca follows web visitors as they migrate across these domains without losing referring information, so when a call is made that entire journey is captured and attributed correctly.
No negative impact on website performance: Only Invoca uses asynchronous JavaScript to find and replace phone numbers on webpages. When webpages load, the script runs separately from other elements and therefore does not cause any delay in load time or page load failures, which can negatively impact digital marketing performance.
No negative impact on SEO: The Invoca code never violates Google’s NAP (name, address, phone number) consistency requirements used to determine organic ranking, so there is no negative impact on a website’s search rankings from implementing Invoca. Google still sees your business’s phone number in the page code when they index your site, but visitors will see a trackable Invoca number. You get all the benefits of call attribution without losing SEO rank.