Most businesses can tell you exactly how many enquiries their website produced last month, because a web form leaves a record. Phone calls leave nothing. Somebody rings, somebody answers, and unless the person who answered writes it down, the call disappears — along with any way of knowing which advertisement paid for it.
Call tracking closes that gap. Instead of publishing your own phone number on your advertising, you publish a tracking number: a real phone number, rented from a call tracking provider, that rings straight through to you. Because each tracking number is only ever published in one place, the provider can tell Gorilla Dash which advertisement the caller was looking at when they dialled.
The caller notices none of this. They dial the number they can see, the call is passed to your real phone, and it rings as usual. What changes is on your side: every call now arrives in Gorilla Dash with a date, a duration, the number the caller dialled, the tribe it belongs to, and — where recording is enabled — the recording itself.
The words you will meet
Two phone numbers are involved in every tracked call, and the Calls screens name them separately. It is worth getting them straight before you go any further, because almost every question about call tracking turns out to be a confusion between the two.
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| Service number | The tracking number — the one you publish on a website, an advertisement, a sign or a directory listing. This is the number the customer dials. |
| Answer number | Your real phone number — the one the tracking number passes the call through to. This is the phone that actually rings. |
| Tribe | one location, branch or business unit inside your organisation. Every tracking number belongs to one tribe, which is how a call ends up in that tribe's reporting. |
| Campaign | A label you put on a group of tracking numbers so you can compare one source of calls against another — paid advertising against organic search, for example. |
What has to be in place
Call tracking is the one module in Gorilla Dash that depends on something outside it. Gorilla Dash does not rent phone numbers or carry calls; it reads the call records from a call tracking provider your organisation has an account with. Networks on Gorilla Dash use Avanser, Delacon, DAS, CallRail or L3, depending on the country they operate in. Three things therefore have to be true before any of the Calls screens have anything to show.
- The Call Tracking module is switched on for your organisation. If Calls does not appear in your left-hand menu, this is the first thing to check with your Gorilla Dash contact.
- Your organisation has an account with a call tracking provider, and that account is connected to Gorilla Dash. Setting this up is done for you when call tracking is first turned on.
- At least one tracking number exists and has been published somewhere a customer can see it. A number that is rented but never advertised will never produce a call.
Where to find everything
Select Calls in the left-hand menu and you will find six screens. They are listed here in the order they appear, with the guide that covers each one.
| Screen | What it is for |
|---|---|
| Calls Dashboard | Call volumes and trends across your tribes. |
| Calls | Every individual call, with its recording, transcript and AI review. |
| Assign Numbers | Which tracking number belongs to which tribe. |
| Manage Campaigns | The labels you group numbers under. |
| Call Review Questions | The questions the AI review answers about each call. |
| Call Settings | Transcription and review models, and the website number switch. |
What call tracking is not
Call tracking records calls that came in on a tracking number. It does not record calls placed directly to a tribe's own published number, calls made from a mobile, or calls forwarded from somewhere Gorilla Dash cannot see. If a tribe insists its phone rings far more often than the Calls screen suggests, that is almost always the reason, and the fix is to work out which of its published numbers are not tracking numbers.
It is also separate from the CRM Call Lists feature, which is about your team making outbound calls to a list of contacts. The two share nothing but the word "call".