Creating and managing RingPools™ to serve dynamic promo numbers

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Whenever someone visits one of your landing pages, Invoca replaces the phone number on your page with an Invoca promo number served specifically for that visitor. Those promo numbers are pulled from your RingPool™ — an Invoca feature that serves as a container for your Invoca promo numbers.

Here’s how RingPools work:
 

• When a visitor lands on your page, the Invoca Tag will swap any phone numbers on that page with an Invoca promo number from your RingPool. For a limited amount of time, only that visitor will see their assigned promo number.
• Any marketing attribution data from that visitor’s session, including Marketing Data, will be captured and associated with that unique phone number.
• When the visitor dials your promo number, the phone call will be routed to the destination phone number that you originally displayed on your landing page. The caller’s marketing attribution data will be reported on that call as well.

When you deploy Invoca on your landing pages, your Invoca account automatically replaces your destination phone numbers with promo numbers from your RingPool. We replace them type for type — matching toll-free and local numbers with the correct NPA or area code.
 

Note:
Your RingPool’s ability to match local phone numbers with Invoca promo numbers is bound by the availability of the area code. If we’re unable to serve a promo number in the area code of your detected destination, we will allocate local numbers in the same rate center — and if no phone numbers in that rate center are available, it will allocate a promo number from the next closest rate center (while staying in the same state).

In addition to the automatic RingPool described above, older Invoca accounts have access to campaign-based RingPools, which create discrete RingPools associated with your individual Invoca campaigns. For help supporting one of these RingPools, see the section below titled “How to manage campaign-based RingPools.”
 

How to manage the size of your RingPools

The number of promo numbers in your Invoca account affects how much your account will be billed. So, it’s important to keep an active hand in managing how many promo numbers are in your RingPools. When you create a new RingPool, you have the option of enabling RingPool Autoscaling — a feature that automatically manages the number of promo numbers in your RingPools scaled to your web traffic. See “How does Invoca manage the size of my RingPools?” for more details.
 

How to manage campaign-based RingPools

In older Invoca accounts, your RingPools are associated with a specific Invoca campaign. These RingPools do not automatically match your destination phone numbers with an Invoca promo number from a similar NPA or area code — instead, you must manually assign these RingPools to a local or toll-free number type. 

For these reasons, we strongly recommend following these instructions for using Invoca Tag-based RingPools if you’re just starting out with Invoca. However, if you need to create or edit a new campaign-based RingPool, you can follow these instructions:

1. Login to your Invoca account and click Campaigns in the sidebar menu, then select Manage Campaigns.
2. In the Manage Campaigns menu, select the campaign in which you would like to setup a RingPool, or create a new Invoca campaign.
3. Select the “RingPools” tab, then click “Add new RingPool”.
4. Fill out the following details for your RingPool. When you’re finished, click Next.
    
   
   • Name: We recommend using the same name as your campaign for easy management.
   • RingPool ID: You only need to consider this if you plan to manage RingPools using our Network Integration API. Otherwise, you can leave it blank.
   • Number session lifetime: this is the minimum amount of time that we’ll store attribution in a given RingPool number. We recommend you select 5 minutes to use your RingPool numbers more efficiently.
   • Max pool size: How many concurrent unique visitors do you want to track on your website? That’s how many phone numbers you should include in your RingPool (minimum: 2). Be aware that that this number may grow or shrink automatically with how Invoca manages the size of your RingPools.
   • Number type: Choose to fill your RingPool with either toll-free or local phone numbers. Toll-free phone number are not area-specific and start with 8XX, (example: 1-877-555-5555). You can also choose local number RingPools, in which your promo numbers begin with local area codes. For more information on local number RingPools, check out Create a Local Number RingPool.
     
     
5. Check the Marketing Data Parameters Captured window to make sure the list shown below matches the types of attribution data you want to capture on the landing page. If not, you can create and edit your Marketing Data dictionary following the steps in our articleHow to create a custom Marketing Data field.  When you are finished, click Save & Next, then click Done.

If you ever need to change any of these settings, repeat step 1 above, then click the RingPools tab and click Edit in the Actions column.
 

FAQ

What if there are more visitors on my landing page than numbers in my RingPool?
A few different things can happen, depending on how your Invoca account is configured to automatically manage the size of your RingPools:
 

• If you’ve set up your RingPool with an Overflow number — a promo number that is set aside to act as the final number in your RingPool — each subsequent visitor to your landing page will see your Overflow number instead of a unique promo number. That Overflow number will accurately route your phone calls and can be useful for basic call tracking, but is unable to capture personalized attribution data for your callers.
• If you’ve set up your RingPool without an Overflow number, your visitors will see the original destination phone number from your landing page, as if Invoca wasn’t active at all. You won’t be able to receive personalized attribution from these phone calls, nor can you track your call volume with Invoca until your RingPool adds more numbers or the session lifetime of one of your previous visitors ends.

How long are my caller’s marketing attribution data associated with a phone number?
The minimum amount of time is defined by the “number session lifetime” RingPool setting. After that, it will hold the attribution until another visitor requires a unique number. If a given number never gets presented to anyone else, the Custom Data attributes will be associated with a phone number up to 72 hours.

What if the visitor writes down the phone number and calls back the following day?
Let’s say visitor A lands on the page on day 1, writes down the phone number and calls on day 2. If the phone number they wrote down hasn’t been assigned to any other visitors after visitor A, then Invoca will still associate visitor A’s attributes with that call. Otherwise, the call will be associated with the latest visitor who has been presented that number. However, this happens very infrequently.

If a given number never gets presented to anyone else, Invoca associates attributes to a phone number up to 72 hours.

When a promo number is removed from my Invoca account, can it be assigned to a different Invoca customer?
Eventually, yes.

After a promo number is removed from your Invoca account — whether you've removed it manually or it's been removed automatically due to your RingPool scaling down — that number is quarantined by Invoca's systems to make sure it's no longer receiving phone calls intended for your business. After we're sure it's clean, it goes back into our pool of available numbers and could be reassigned to another Invoca customer.

Theoretically this could combine with the FAQ question above, in which a customer writes down an Invoca promo number for your business and calls back much later, and is routed to a different business entirely. In reality, this kind of mix-up is exceedingly rare.

Can I access my RingPools programmatically (via API)?
Yes! Check out our documentation on our RingPool API and Bulk RingPool API for more details.

Related:
• How to create an Invoca campaign 
• Basic Knowledge: Capturing Marketing Data with Invoca 
• Basic Knowledge: Invoca reports