Here’s a great tracking tool from New Call Solutions™ that will show you which keyword terms produce phone calls from your website.
20-60% of online searches result in an offline response (research varies on this percentage, but suffice it to say a lot of people call directly from the website) – when someone goes to your website in many cases they’ll pick up the phone and call to speak with a live person offline if you make a phone number available to them.
Most businesses completely overlook how important these phone calls are to their profitability, and they have no idea how to identify which search terms result in a phone call.
If you’re selling directly online you can measure shopping cart sales, but how do you know how many calls come to your business through your website and convert to offline sales? This is particularly valuable information to know if your site is designed for lead generation.
This is an elusive metric that New Call Solutions™ has figured out how to measure with their dynamic tracking script.
All of the metrics available through Google Analytics and similar tracking software systems account for online activity like clickthroughs, bounce rates, page views, goal pages, and on, and on – but there is tremendous gap that’s being missed – offline conversion.
Here’s a new and effective way to track which search terms, page views and referring websites produce phone calls from your site.
I. Like Google Analytics you’ll need to install a special JavaScript on your site.
II. Once the script is properly installed New Call Solutions™ will populate your web pages with a dynamic tracking phone number which will replace the original phone number you had listed.
The JavaScript calls a server and tells it to display a unique tracking number on your website. Every time someone visits your website it displays a unique tracking number on your site from a pool of numbers. Each web session (visitor/IP address) is assigned a unique tracking number. As the visitor clicks through your site the number is displayed on every page.
This tracking system reads the URL from which the visitor came and identifies the specific search term and referring website that lead them to your site. You’re able to see if they typed in your web address directly, which search engine they came from or if they were referred from another site.
If the visitor leaves your site, the tracking system stores information about that unique web session. New Call Solutions™ is able recognize a repeat visitor by associating their visit with previous visits, that way if they pick up the phone on the second or third visit (which is highly likely) the original search term or source of the visitor will get credit for the call.
If you have 20 visitors (web sessions) on your site all at once each visitor will all see a different phone number displayed. The second a visitor leaves your site the displayed tracking number is “sidelined” and then rotated back into the pool of dynamic numbers and is then ready to use for another visitor. That’s why this is called a dynamic tracking script.
There are several key advantages to using this dynamic tracking script compared to other tracking systems that claim to offer the same solutions:
1. Using this JavaScript you can track all of the various keywords, click path and referring websites without using proxy websites. If you’re not farmilure with proxy websites, basically they are mirror-versions of a website that sits on a different server. When a visitor finds your site online through an ad the hosting company creates a proxy of the original website that looks just like the original site and they dynamically display a tracking phone number on the proxy site.
Using proxy sites are bad for organic search optimization because they create an inconsistent experience for the visitor if forms and other basic functions are involved, and it prevents you from fully controlling the online campaign. Plus, websites that are built with simple do-it-yourself tools cannot be easily replicated on proxy servers.
Using this system allows you to get exceptional tracking without driving visitors away from your actual site.
2. If you had hundreds of tracking phone numbers to account for all of the various keywords and referring websites that produced a phone call it would be unwieldy, unmanageable and very expensive. Using this approach frees you from having to manage hundreds of phone numbers, instead everything is housed behind the scenes and search data is automatically captured and associated to call data. The dynamic pool of tracking numbers does all the work for you without the expense.
III. Login to your reporting to gather important data about your website and find out which keywords produce phone calls:
IV. You can also capture other important call details and actually listen to how salespeople or customer service reps handle inbound calls from your website.
If you want to drill down further, each call can be tagged with the specific outcome using a phone code. The person handling the inbound call from the web enters a code after the customer or prospect hangs-up indicating the outcome of the call. For example: 001 = appointment set, 002 = sale made, 003 = needs follow up
This feature can be turned on or off as needed and will allow you to see which keywords produced a specific outcome.
Not only is this a powerful tool to link online and offline conversion, but it helps join the marketing and sales side of the house. With this tool you can plug up the gaps in your marketing and sales funnel with true metrics.
As more businesses jump online and put money into search advertising and other online marketing, measuring
offline conversion becomes more critical to success. Traditional measurement metrics are simply not enough.
It’s an extremely useful tool (a must have for any business looking for calls) that only requires the installation of a single line of JavaScript.
To learn more about how to implement this system with your clients check out:
Ryan Pitz
http://www.newcallsolutions.com/services_trackcalls-site.htm