Current Issues in Marketing Strategy

Tracking phone calls generated from your website advertising has long been the missing link in the online advertisers tracking metrics and with consumers so drawn to picking up the phone many advertisers simply don't know how to account for it other than a vague feeling of more or less calls on any given day. Today I wanted to discuss a little trick of mine that has helped both small and large clients to track their online conversion rates by advertising channel and measure exactly how many phone calls an given advertising channel has generated.

Dynamic phone number tracking has been generated by a number of telco's, but one that my company is directly related to have surpassed all others by integrating their results with Google analytics. In fact so effective have they been that Google Australia uses them to display how to track incoming calls to their clientele. The best part of the deal is that it won't cost you a cent more than a traditional 1300 number and for small business we are talking about less than $100 a month including phone call costs. So what is the advantage?

The advantage is quite simple, at the end of any given month you can tell exactly how many phone calls your Adwords generated, how many came from Facebook, and eDM or any other advertising channel you have used. You can then work backwards to integrate these results with your online metrics to unearth the exact cost per acquisition for each advertising channel and better optimise your spend accordingly. The data is so sophisticated you can even see what a user typed into Google prior to making the phone call.

For those technically minded people, the way it works is actually pretty simple. There is a little bit of java script that sits around the phone number on your website, this reads the source of any given user (Adwords, Facebook, Yahoo) and chooses which 1300 number to display, so you have a unique phone number displayed for each entrance source the user could have come from and therefore you know which channel has generated calls. This is integrated into your Google analytics and can even be set to record the phone call.

It is a terrific system and I highly recommend you include it into your online and offline advertising to effectively track phone calls from every advertising medium, filtering the results back into your strategic marketing plan and overall marketing mix.

If you are interested in knowing more please contact me and I will be happy to take you through dynamic phone number tracking and set you up with an account free of charge. Just call Josh on 0402 844 409