From the digital marketing channels driving calls to the contact centers and business locations converting them, compare your performance to industry peers using the anonymized insights our AI captured from over 70 million phone calls and 600 million minutes of conversation.

Whether you're a CMO looking to maximize digital marketing ROI, a sales leader working to improve conversion rates, or a CX professional striving for seamless customer experiences, these insights provide the benchmarks you need to measure your performance against peers and competitors.

Be sure to try the interactive calculator ↓ at the end of this report to see how even small increases in your call conversion performance can drastically improve revenue.

At a glance

Research Highlights

Here's a snapshot of the benchmarks across all industries. See anything that surprises you? Keep reading to see how you compare to others in your industry.

56%

of callers to businesses speak with a person

38%

of calls from digital marketing are leads

42%

of those leads convert on the call

64%

of businesses don't ask leads to buy or book appointments

Section 01

Call Answer Rates

Your digital ads have done their job, and a potential customer is interested enough to call your business, but the call goes unanswered. You've wasted the marketing budget that got that phone to ring, and you've likely lost a customer to a competitor that actually answered.

56%

of callers to businesses speak with a person

Across all industries, 56% of calls to businesses are answered by a person. Every unanswered call could be a missed opportunity.

For calls that last longer than 15 seconds (filtering out misdials and quick hangups), the answer rate climbs to 65%. For calls over 30 seconds, it reaches 71%. These thresholds give a clearer picture of how well businesses handle callers who are genuinely trying to connect.

56%

All Inbound Calls

65%

Calls Over 15 Seconds

71%

Calls Over 30 Seconds

Review the industry benchmarks below to see how you compare. If your answer rates fall significantly below your industry's benchmark, it indicates missed revenue due to poor routing, process issues, or staffing gaps in your contact centers or business locations.

Call answer rates by industry

Tactics to Improve Call Answer Rates

Here are four strategies to improve call answer rates if your business falls significantly below industry benchmarks.

1
Deploy AI agents to engage leads 24/7
AI-powered voice and SMS agents can engage callers around the clock, so no lead goes unanswered, even after hours or during peak volume. When a caller can't reach a person, an AI agent can qualify their intent, answer questions, schedule a callback, or book an appointment via text. This is the single biggest lever for improving answer rates and speed-to-lead.
2
Use missed call data to inform staffing
Identify the specific days and times when missed calls spike, then compare those windows against call volume to pinpoint understaffing. Adjust schedules and resources so your team is available when callers need them most.
3
Pause ads when you're closed
If your business can't assist callers during off-hours, consider pausing paid campaigns that drive high call volumes during those windows. There's no reason to pay for calls that can't be answered, unless you have an AI agent handling them.
4
Identify site issues causing unnecessary calls
Some calls happen because your website didn't provide the information people needed. Look for patterns, such as if callers are frequently asking questions that should be answered on your site, fix the content or form experience. Fewer unnecessary calls mean your team can focus on the ones that matter.

Section 02

Phone Lead and Conversion Rates

Understanding which calls represent sales opportunities is the key to connecting marketing spend to revenue. Our data reveals that across all industries, 38% of calls answered by a person are leads, and 42% of those leads convert on the call.

38%

of answered calls are leads

42%

of leads convert on the call

For marketing leaders, this data is essential for calculating true campaign performance and return on ad spend. For contact center and sales leaders, it sets the baseline for measuring how effectively your agents and staff convert phone leads and where coaching can help.

Phone lead and conversion rates by industry

Answered calls that are leads

Leads that convert

Phone lead and conversion rates by marketing channel

For marketing teams, understanding phone lead and conversion rates by channel helps measure your true impact on business results and optimize accordingly. It also reveals whether certain channels are better at driving top-of-funnel leads versus bottom-of-funnel conversions.

Answered calls that are leads

Leads that convert

A note on volume: percentages alone don't tell the full story

Paid search drives the highest volume of calls, leads, and conversions of any paid channel. The same applies to Google Business Profiles for multi-location businesses on the organic side. Channel efficiency matters, but so does scale.

New data

What the data shows about ChatGPT and generative AI search

This is the first year there was enough data to measure calls driven by generative AI search.

The lead rate from ChatGPT-referred calls stands out: 49% of answered calls from ChatGPT are leads, roughly 10 percentage points above the all-channel average and 6 points higher than the next-best performing channel (Google Business Profiles at 43%). Conversion rates from ChatGPT-referred calls are about average at 40%, approximately 3 points below the top-performing channels.

So what should you take from this? The calls coming from ChatGPT are more likely to be qualified leads, which makes sense. Someone who uses an AI assistant to research a product or service and then picks up the phone is fairly deep in their buying journey.

But the important context is that the total volume of calls attributable to generative AI is still very low, with no measurable volume from LLMs other than ChatGPT. This is a signal worth watching closely, not a channel worth diverting significant budget toward — yet. For now, the bulk of your phone leads and conversions are still coming from proven, high-volume channels like paid search and Google Business Profiles.

Phone lead performance by industry and channel

Percentage of answered calls that are leads.

Phone conversion performance by industry and channel

Percentage of leads that convert on the call.

Tactics to Improve Phone Lead and Conversion Rates

If your phone lead rates fall short of industry benchmarks, your paid media might not be driving the right calls. If conversion rates are lower, your contact centers or locations may not be saying the right things to convert callers. Here are four strategies to close those gaps.

1
Shift ad budget to what's really working
Use phone lead and conversion data to evaluate which channels, campaigns, and keywords are driving the best return. Then reallocate budget from underperformers to the investments that are actually producing revenue.
2
Pass call data to ad platforms for better auto-bidding
Feed phone lead and conversion data back into your ad platforms to fuel smarter automated bidding and audience targeting. This gives the algorithms real business outcomes to optimize against.
3
Use call data to improve ad targeting and optimization
Retarget leads that didn't convert on the call and suppress callers who already converted or called for non-sales reasons. And use your highest-value calls to build lookalike audiences that find more prospects like your best customers. Also, use "voice of the customer" data from calls to optimize everything from ad copy to landing pages to deflect low-value inquiries and improve conversion rates.
4
Use AI agents to convert more leads
AI-powered voice and SMS agents can help you convert more leads after hours, during peak times, and with consumers who prefer engaging with an automated agent. AI agents can qualify lead intent, schedule appointments and callbacks, or speed up routing to human agents for high-intent leads.

Section 03

Google Ads Paid Search Performance by Industry

Google Ads remains the most important digital advertising channel for driving phone-based conversions. Even small improvements to your phone lead and conversion rates from search ads can have a significant impact on business results.

Answered calls that are leads

Leads that convert

Tactics to Improve Phone Lead Rates and ROAS from Google Ads

If your Google Ads paid search results lag behind others in your industry, consider these strategies to improve efficiency and increase ROAS.

1
Shift spend to the keywords driving the most valuable calls
Identify which keywords generate qualified phone leads and conversions, then reallocate budget from underperforming terms to those high-value terms.
2
Use phone lead and conversion data to fuel Smart Bidding and Performance Max
Feed call outcome data into Google's automated bidding algorithms so they optimize for calls that actually turn into appointments or sales.
3
Retarget phone leads that didn't convert
Build audience segments from callers who were leads but didn't convert. These in-market audiences are often your most valuable.
4
Suppress non-lead and converted calls from seeing ads
Stop spending money showing ads to people who've already converted or who called for non-sales reasons. This alone can dramatically reduce wasted ad spend.
5
Add your most valuable calls to lookalike campaigns
Create lookalike audiences based on your highest-value callers to find more prospects with similar characteristics and behaviors.

Section 04

Call Handling Performance

Answering the call is step one. How your agents or location staff engage with the caller, address their needs, and guide them toward a decision determines whether that lead becomes a customer.

Our analysis evaluated how often businesses correctly handle phone leads across six key call handling metrics.

Call handling performance by industry

Tactics to Improve Call Handling Performance

If your metrics fall below your industry benchmarks — or if you don't have this level of insight into how calls are being handled — here are four strategies to drive improvements.

1
Use AI to score call handling performance
Implement AI-powered call scoring to get objective analytics on 100% of calls. With AI scoring, you can measure agent performance against key metrics at scale and spot trends you'd otherwise miss.
2
Qualify and route leads with an AI voice agent
An AI voice agent can qualify callers and route them to the right person before a human agent picks up. This means your sales team spends less time on non-leads, and high-intent callers get connected quickly to the agent or location best equipped to convert them.
3
Pass caller data to agents before the conversation starts
Arm your agents with context from the caller's digital journey, such as which ad they clicked, which pages they visited, and what they searched for. When agents know why someone is calling before they say hello, conversations are more relevant and close rates go up.
4
Refine talk tracks based on what actually works
Use call scoring data to correlate specific agent behaviors with call outcomes. What are your top converters doing differently? Identify patterns, update your talk tracks, and provide targeted coaching to agents who need it, using specific call examples to illustrate what great looks like.

What's next

Turning These Insights Into Action

This benchmark data provides a clear picture of how businesses across 10 industries are performing in answering calls, converting leads, and handling customer conversations. It's a useful starting point for evaluating where you stand and where to focus.

But benchmarking only works if you have the data to compare against. And that's where most businesses hit a wall. Without visibility into which calls are leads, which marketing channels are driving them, how well your team is converting them, and what's happening in the conversations themselves, you're making decisions in the dark.

The brands that connect their digital data, conversation data, and transaction data have a meaningful advantage. They can see the full journey from ad click to phone call to conversion and use that picture to make better optimization decisions across marketing, sales, and operations.

The good news: even small improvements compound quickly. If your results align with the benchmarks in this report, improving your answer rate, lead rate, and conversion rate by just five percentage points each would drive roughly 40% more conversions from the same call volume.

~40%

more conversions from the same call volume — if you improve your answer rate, lead rate, and conversion rate by just five percentage points each

Want to see how much of a difference it could make? Try the interactive calculator below!

Interactive tool

What Would Converting More Calls Mean for Your Revenue?

You're already driving the demand. Try this calculator to see how much additional revenue you can drive by converting more of the leads you're getting today.

Model your own improvement

Plug in your current call volume, answer rate, lead rate, and conversion rate to see the revenue impact of closing the gap to your industry benchmark.

Methodology

How this report was built

This report is based on an analysis of anonymized data from over 70 million calls and 600 million minutes of phone conversations tracked and analyzed by the Invoca platform. Data spans 10 industries and 7 marketing channels. All figures are averages across the Invoca customer base.