Employees at Santa Barbara-based Invoca’s downtown offices. (courtesy photo)

Mobile search is experiencing a huge surge in volume of sales over Santa Barbara-based Invoca’s technology platform, with $1.7 billion of the $2.5 billion in customer sales that have happened since 2007 taking place in the past year.

Invoca makes software that helps companies close more sales when customers call in and track where and how the calls were generated to boost future marketing campaigns. The company has raised $30.8 million from investors that include Santa Barbara-based Rincon Venture Partners, Palo Alto powerhouse Accel Partners and Salesforce.com.

When Inovca was started in 2007, it s founders wanted to solve a simple problem. Digital ads are tracked so that a commission can be paid out when the ad results in a sale, but none of the systems could attribute a sale if the customer picked up the phone to close the deal, which the company believed would happen more in the then-nascent smartphone era.

Invoca eventually evolved into a complete automation system that gives its customers, which include Fortune 1000 brands, the same kind of control and insight with their phone-based campaigns as they have over email or display ads.

Those customers closed $1.7 billion in sales using Inovca’s software last year, and CEO Jason Spievak told the Business Times that mobile search was the standout driver. “Mobile search in particular is outpacing desktop search,” Spievak said. “We’re all doing it. As result, the calls driven by mobile search made up 65 percent of the mobile calls driven over our platform last year.”

Invoca recently hit the 100-employee mark and opened an office in San Francisco near fellow Santa Barbara startup Procore’s Bay Area office.

The unforeseen explosion in mobile search means Invoca is taking a hard look at how to help customers capitalize on the trend. Spievak said there’s no plan for a specific product — some of Inovca’s partners provide mobile search tools — on the firm’s radar. “It certainly gets consideration on our road map. I think mobile search and inbound call marketing automation go together like chocolate and peanut butter,” he said.