PhoneWagon raises $1.2M to track when marketing campaigns lead to phone calls

When it comes to tracking the effectiveness of online advertising campaigns, PhoneWagon CEO Ryan Shank said there’s been a big piece missing for most businesses — namely, how often those campaigns lead to phone calls.

Shank has plenty of experience in local marketing, having worked in sales at Yext, then serving as COO Mhelpdesk, which was sold to IAC’s HomeAdvisor.

And he’s announcing that PhoneWagon has raised $1.2 million in seed funding, led by Birchmere Ventures, with participation from Active Capital. The startup was part of the most recent class of startups at Techstars NYC, and its angel investors include early Yext employees Adam Liebman, Adam Kaplan and Dave Greenberger.

Shank acknowledged that there are existing call tracking services like CallRail, but he argued that their pricing and the difficulty of setup puts them out of reach for many small businesses.

“These other guys, they even speak too technical about it,” he said.

With PhoneWagon, Shank aimed to build something that was “easy-to-use, beautiful, simple” and therefore usable by SMBs.

Businesses just install a few lines of JavaScript on their website, then when someone comes to the site thanks to an online ad, they’re presented with a dynamically generated phone number.

If you’re the kind of company that gets a lot of business over the phone, these dynamic numbers make it easier to break down which traffic sources, keywords and campaigns drove the most valuable calls.

Other features include integrations with Google AdWords and other platforms, as well as the ability to show local and toll-free phone numbers to each visitor.

PhoneWagon already has nearly 150 customers and is added 40 new customers every month, Shank said.