• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, October 7, 2013

Performance mobile advertising company Marchex has rolled out a pair of enhancements to its call analytics services for marketers. One of the new offerings, dubbed Call DNA, automatically provides a visual breakdown of inbound calls through a color-coded chart showing exactly how time on a customer call was spent.

That information includes the total time of the call and how long the agent or caller spoke, as well as the duration of silences and hold times when music is playing. A data panel below the audio-tracking chart also indicates the gender of the caller and whether a call led to a sale or other conversion.

The capability also allows marketers who are running click-to-call ads to view call data in aggregate to analyze patterns and better understand what leads to sales. Marchex President Pete Christothoulou said that companies would otherwise have to manually listen to recordings of calls to get the same level of insight. Often, the duration of a call has served as a standard metric of the quality of a call.

“We know that many calls can be long, but it’s because you’re on hold,” said Christothoulou. “This gives a really clear view of what’s happening on the phone call and the level of engagement between the caller and the advertiser.”

Through their Marchex dashboards, users can see call quality data as it comes in during a campaign and have it segmented by different criteria -- for example, including calls that resulted in no conversation, extended conversations, and conversions. “The marketer is able to sort based on different classifications, so they can see what type of calls are happening in the aggregate and dig deeper into each of those classifiers,” said Christothoulou.

The ultimate aim, of course, is to deliver higher performance and  ROI from ads beyond just a click. To that end, Marchex also introduced Dynamic Tracking, a new service that helps to determine which impressions and Web-based sessions led to calls in addition to the keyword-level tracking the company already provides.

Historically, an advertiser would have to assign a separate phone number to each impression or specific keyword to know which was generating leads. This becomes increasingly difficult and costly for businesses that are tracking millions of keywords and impressions and receiving huge call volumes.

“Our technology has figured out how to do all that by using a very small number pool to track all that information without needing a one-to-one ratio,” said Christothoulou.

Marchex is launching both Call DNA and Dynamic Tracking as premium analytics services; marketers will pay extra for it. Since the products are rolling out now, no advertisers have begun to use either offering.

Marchex in the second quarter reported revenue of $39 million, up from $34 million a year ago. The vast majority of its revenue -- $33.9 million -- came from call-based advertising. The company had an adjusted profit of four cents a share compared to six cents a share in the year-earlier period.