Whether you’re just starting out as a real estate investor or you run a multimillion dollar investment company, everyone wants to make sure the money they spend on lead generation actually lands deals.
The best way to do that is with campaign tracking (tying specific leads to their source, like Facebook, a direct mailer, or even a billboard or radio ad). That’s easy with specific landing pages and forms. But what if a lead calls you? Even if you ask where they heard about you, they may not remember or provide specifics.
Enter call tracking. Call tracking lets you put a unique phone number on all of your lead generation channels and campaigns so you know exactly where a lead came from.
And now, call tracking is built directly into your Carrot website and included in your subscription!
Key Takeaways
- Call tracking lets you identify which lead sources drive the most leads and deals, based on real data, not guesswork and gut feelings.
- If you don’t have call tracking enabled on our website, you don’t know how many leads your site actually generates. Form submissions is an incomplete picture of a real estate website’s lead generation power (especially since 50.78% of web traffic comes from mobile devices, according to proprietary Carrot data).
- Carrot AI Call Insights provides automatic call transcripts, summaries, a call rating, and actionable next steps so you know exactly what was discussed and which leads to work first based on their motivation and fit.
Setting up call tracking gives you peace of mind that your marketing efforts work and allows you to focus on the areas that drive the best results.
Table of Contents
- What are the benefits of call tracking for real estate investors?
- Who uses call tracking?
- How does Carrot Call Tracking work?
- How much does Carrot Call Tracking Cost?
- How does Carrot’s Call Tracking compare to other call tracking services?
- Take your business to the next level with call tracking
What are the benefits of call tracking for real estate investors?
Call tracking gives you a clear, accurate understanding of where each phone lead came from. Did they visit your website then call you? Did they see something on social media or get a specific direct mailer? Knowing where each lead came from lets you know what’s working.
Say you’re trying out two different direct mail pieces. A lead calls and says they got your postcard. But you don’t know which one it is. You can ask them to describe it, but is that really how you want to spend your time on the phone with a new motivated lead? No! With call tracking, you can skip the entire “how did you hear about us” conversation because you already know based on the number they called. Over time, you’ll know which campaigns are the most effective based on real data tied to each unique number.
Call tracking is particularly important for understanding your website’s effectiveness. In 2024, 50.78% of traffic to Carrot-hosted websites came from mobile devices. And when people are searching on a mobile device, it’s easier to click on the phone number and make a call than it is to fill out a form. If you’re not attributing these calls to your website, you won’t have a complete picture of its effectiveness. You may even think your website isn’t generating leads when in reality it could be your biggest driver of calls.
“The funny thing is, most of my leads are coming from people who find the site but choose to call instead of filling out the form. I’ve started asking everyone how they found me and what made them reach out, and more and more people are skipping the form entirely and just dialing the number. … It’s happening so often that I wonder if it’s part of a bigger shift in consumer behavior.“
— Jeff Tucker, Jeff Buys Houses Cash
In addition to knowing which sources generate the most leads, pay attention to which sources generate the best leads — the ones that turn into deals more often or have the largest value. You might get 100 calls from direct mail pieces, but if none of them turn into a deal, then it’s not really a good lead source. Meanwhile, you might only get a few calls a month from your website, but if most of them turn into deals, that’s a great source! With the average real estate investor spending $1,000 a month on advertising, making sure every dollar works is critical. You need a way to track actual success when deciding where to spend your money and determining campaign ROI.
Identifying your real lead and deal sources lets you turn off marketing methods that aren’t producing deals and focus your time, energy, and budget on the channels that actually generate revenue. If you’re a high lead volume business, knowing which channels convert to deals more often also allows you to prioritize new leads, focusing on the best lead sources first.
You may have a general idea of where your best leads come from, but not knowing for sure means you could be wasting money or time. Call tracking makes it crystal clear, no guesswork involved.
Who uses call tracking?
The beauty of Carrot’s built-in call tracking is that it makes this great feature accessible to any investor, without having to purchase a separate service.
Solo & Newer Investors
When you’re a one-person team, your time matters even more. And if you’re newer to real estate investing, you might be particularly sensitive about your budget and profit margins. Built-in call tracking included with your website gives you an accurate understanding of lead generation effectiveness without shopping around for another tool or learning and integrating another system.
It’s an easy, hassle-free way to understand how much revenue each advertising dollar generates so you can focus your time and money where it will have the greatest impact and accelerate your business.
Team Managers
Whether you manage a large team or work with a VA or two, visibility is key to ensuring your team (and business) is successful. Call tracking helps with this in two ways:
- It makes sure any marketing plans someone else puts in place are working (and not just wasting your money). If you don’t see any calls coming in from a specific campaign, that’s a sign you need to ask some critical questions about it.
- It provides insights into your VA’s or lead manager’s availability, responsiveness, and capacity. You can easily see the total number of calls, how many were answered, and how many were missed.
At the end of the day, call tracking helps give you full visibility into what’s driving results, no matter who’s handling your marketing or fielding calls.
How does Carrot Call Tracking work?
Carrot’s built-in call tracking puts a unique, local phone number (different than your personal or business number) on your website. This tells you exactly how many phone call come from people visiting your website. Call tracking combined with the lead generation forms on your site give you a complete understanding of how many leads your site generates.
When you’re ready to turn Carrot Call Tracking on, simply:
- Select a number local to your area (this is important as it let’s leads know you’re a real, local person, not some nameless, faceless mega company).
- Connect your new number to a receiving line where you want calls forwarded.
- Sit back and relax as Carrot automatically replaces the phone number currently on your site with the new tracking number. (If you have landing pages that already have unique numbers, we won’t change those).
The whole process takes less than five minutes!
If you want to add unique numbers to different marketing campaigns or landing pages, simply add numbers to your account, assign them to a tracking campaign, and add them to your marketing. (Remember, for call tracking to work effectively, don’t use the same number across multiple campaigns or marketing channels!)
When a call comes in, it rings through to your receiving line. If you’re unavailable, the caller can leave a voicemail like normal and that message is tracked to the appropriate campaign in your call tracking dashboard. All calls are recorded so you can revisit them or use the AI Call Insights feature for additional insights. Whether you pick up or the lead leaves a message, a two-party consent message plays automatically before recording starts, satisfying the strictest state requirements. Recordings are stored for 30 days (60 if you have the AI Call Insights add-on). If you want to keep them longer, you can download recordings before they expire.
All inbound calls are automatically logged in CarrotCRM. If a matching opportunity exists, the call is attached. If there isn’t an existing opportunity for this lead, the system automatically creates one tagged with the campaign. If you use a different CRM, we’re working on a Zapier integration to push call details, recording URLs, and transcripts (when available) from your free CarrotCRM instance to your CRM of choice. Stay tuned for that update (or talk to one of our experts about switching to CarrotCRM!)
If you miss a call or receive a text message to the tracking number, you’ll get an email with the caller’s number and a link to the recording (if they left a voicemail) or a copy of the text message they sent. These email notifications are great for on-the-go investors, letting you catch up on incoming calls or keep up with VA activity no matter where you are. Have some down time between meetings? Get everything you need to know about your latest lead and follow up now instead of waiting until you’re back in the office.
Analytics & AI Call Insights
The call tracking dashboard gives you a quick view into how many calls you’ve received and how many were answered, missed, and left messages. Each call log shows you the time, date, contact details, duration of the call, and provides a link to the transcript if you have AI Call Insights enabled. You can view all calls, or drill down into specific campaigns.
AI Call Insights gives you even more useful information by providing:
- Automatic Transcripts: Recorded calls are transcribed within ~2 minutes post-call. Transcripts feature speaker labels and remove the “um’s,” “so’s,” and pauses, giving you a clean view of who said what.
- Call Summaries: Each call is distilled into a clear 2-4 sentence summary that captures the tone, urgency, and what was discussed.
- Call Rating: AI analyzes the call based on critical factors like pricing alignment, urgency, and engagement then gives the call a 0-100 rating, allowing you to identify and prioritize the most promising calls first instead of wasting time on callers who aren’t serious yet.
- AI Action Items: AI analyzes the call and pulls out bulleted action items so you know exactly what to do next.
Transcripts and summaries automatically sync to the matching CRM opportunity so when you’re working a lead you always have the latest information.
AI Call Insights let’s you move faster and more intentionally. Instead of listening to a missed call or relistening to a call when you’re ready to reach out again, you can save time by getting a quick recap instead. Not sure which lead to follow up with first? The Call Rating assesses a lead’s readiness and motivation and gives you a rating summary so you know what’s behind that assessment. These ratings help you prioritize the leads that are most likely to turn into deals. It’s similar to AI Lead Scoring, but specific to this call or text message and helps you move quickly with leads who are ready to sell before they move on to someone else.
With the built-in AI features, you no longer have to upload a call recording into an external transcription service or load a transcription into ChatGPT to find the key points. You can also stop relying on virtual assistants to listen to all the calls and provide written recaps. It’s all down for you in a matter of minutes.
How much does Carrot Call Tracking Cost?
Carrot call tracking gives you one local number to use on your Carrot website, plus 100 recording minutes and 25 inbound SMS messages per month as part of your Carrot subscription.
If you reach 80% of your recording minutes or SMS limit, you’ll get an email alert letting you know you’re nearing capacity. If you go over the threshold, it’s $0.05 per minute and $0.03 per additional inbound SMS message. Keep track of your costs on the Usage and Costs page, which displays your real-time consumption, projected overages, and invoice history for full transparency.
Need additional numbers for different marketing campaigns? No problem! You can add as many local numbers as you’d like for $3/month each.
AI Call Insights can be added to your subscription for $39 per month. (AI Call Insights is not part of the CarrotCRM AI feature suite. Turing on CarrotCRM AI features does not enable AI Call Insights.)
How does Carrot’s Call Tracking compare to other call tracking services?
We believe that call tracking is a critical component of measuring your success and managing your budget and focus, so we worked hard to make it as affordable as possible. Because it’s fully integrated into our real estate website platform, we were able to make it part of the subscription and only charge for additional usage. Most other call tracking solutions (like CallRail) are standalone services that need to be connected to an external website.
CallRail starts monthly subscriptions at $50/mo (plus the cost of your website as CallRail doesn’t offer this service).
Carrot Call Tracking vs. CallRail
| CallRail | Carrot Call Tracking |
| 5 numbers | 5 numbers (1 included, plus 4 add-ons) |
| 250 minutes | 250 minutes (100 included, plus 150 overage minutes) |
| $50/mo | $19.50/mo |
Carrot Call Tracking vs. CallRail with AI Insights
| CallRail | Carrot Call Tracking |
| 5 numbers | 5 numbers (1 included, plus 4 add-ons) |
| 250 minutes | 250 minutes (100 included, plus 150 overage minutes) |
| AI insights & call transcriptions | AI insights & call transcriptions |
| $100/mo | $58.50/mo |
Take your business to the next level with call tracking
Managing time, budget, and understanding your return on investment is critical for any business at any stage. Call tracking is another tool that gives you deeper understanding of what’s working and where to focus your efforts. For many real estate investors, it’s the missing piece to their reporting. You know how many leads you generate, how many turn into deals, how many form fills you get. Now it’s time to know exactly how many calls and text messages you get from leads, and exactly where they came from. Stop driving blind and start making smarter decisions based on real call tracking data to take your business to the next level.