Interesting post, Anna. I'd like to introduce something like this to my sites.

One thing we have done, which costs nothing, is to add some additional code to our back-end to track the revenue which arises from telephone sales. When a call centre person handles a telephone order via the back-end, it fires the usual GA e-commerce tracking and then calls _trackEvent and passes some information including the channel (telephone), the staff member's name, and the order total.

From this data we can report on total sales from telephone, total revenue, average telephone order values, and see how well individual staff members are doing at tele-sales.

Tying that up with actual call tracking is the next goal!

One of the things that we changed when developing a call tracking solution at a previous job was to move from Goal Tracking to Events for calls.

The reason for this is that using goals requires fake pageviews which makes traffic figures inaccurate - as you can imagine if you call centre is taking hundreds of call a day/week.

Overall good post though :)

Tracking phone calls via keywords, campaigns and traffic sources and creating phone call goals is relatively simple.

However do you guys know anyway of tracking phone calls against urls? I.e. what page got the most phone calls. Assume my website has the phone number everywhere and dynamical changes per keyword, campaign etc.

Great post Anna - thanks.

I've not heard of Infinity before but have worked with AdInsight, another UK vendor. This is what I wrote about them last Sept, http://www.120feet.com/web-analytics-reporting-gold-tying-a-visit-to-an-inbound-call/

Thanks for the feedback.

@ Matt, that sounds like a handy method you've set up, integrating something like infinity will just top it all off and allow you to see the interaction with the site before the call was made, which we have found very enlightening.

@ Dan, that's a good point, currently the sites we have used it on have high value mid volume calls. If you want to have a report in GA where the traffic is not affected I'd have a profile for all the data and another one to exclude all pageviews generated by calls. Not ideal but could help.

Your method will have benefited from Events being able to be Goals in the new interface too, previously Events weren't as useful as they are now!

@ Michael, the reverse goal path report can help you here, often someone who calls doesn't visit many pages so you can see which key pages each caller visited.

@ Jonathan, thanks, we used to used AdInsight, but actually found we got a lot more insight from Infinity. They might have updated things since we used them, but if you want to compare the two have a read of our review of Infinity here: http://www.koozai.com/blog/search-marketing/infinity-tracking-review-1479/

Definitely better than nothing, but can be problematic in a couple of other ways:
1. Phone number recall will be shot to bits, in fact, you don't want them to remember the number (ideally) - but some will, and therefore may affect measurements. Of course you can de-dupe repeat calls, but only on the same number (and what happens if they revisit the site from another source anyway?)
2. We run a site where each advertiser has a phone number which is then automatically 'charged' for a lead. This route will mean that every advertiser would need a suite of numbers to allow the measurements to take place, so it only really works on one-advertiser websites (business sites) and not advertising sites (surely the more likely 'buyer')

There are cuter ways of doing this...

Thanks Anna,

@ Matt, We have integrated Infinity into many client CRMs so that when the sale happens whether straight away or days later, they can send a call back to our system. We can record the transaction information ie ref, value margin and more.

@ Dan, Yes good point and we will be switching to events in the near future, as soon as the majority of our clients are using GA V5.

@ Michael, as Anna says you can use reverse goal path reports but we can also report on the most common pages that calls are made from within our portal; contact us for more info or a demo.

@ John, to answer a couple of your points:

1. We use the same number ranges so they look familiar to help this. Although our data shows that people use sites like directories and come back to the site and ring; often continue browsing while talking.

2. Your correct every advertiser would need its own number pool, but we implemented a custom solution for a large motor listing client doing this. Be happy to discuss with you in more detail offline.

@Michael, AdInsight can do this through its own reporting or when configured properly also through Google Analytics. Our solution has a completely integrated web analytics and telecoms switch infrastructure which makes this possible.

@Jonathan, thanks for the mention!

@Anna, you previously used our Classic call tracking product which could not track individual visitors. Our AdInsight Clarity product is a huge leap forward. I am glad you are finding the call tracking data useful!

@John, we handle your first point using various bits of technology and also cater for people switching from one marketing source to another. As with any solution like this it can never be 100% accurate, but it goes a long way to get there. As for your second point you are correct; each advertiser would need a suite of numbers, but there is nothing wrong with this so long as they are being used. It would be interesting to know what you think the ‘cuter’ ways are?

Hi,

We've been doing this on a load of our sites for a while now. We simply generate the numbers ourselves and track from there. And this can sometimes be simpler than using a 3rd party service.

However, if you really want an easy way to get lots of rich data (geo-caller-id, keyword, campaign, offline data) then a 3rd party solution can do a lot of the heavy lifting.

I'm presenting at Jump next week on this whole topic, so here is a list of the products I've looked at and the coverage they offer internationally.

One last thought - the future of all of this stuff is being able to experiment and gain insight. In future, I fully expect to test music, messages, prioritisation of calls, routing, local numbers and the like, with total integration in my analytics package. To me, phone is another channel that is under optimised with businesses and ripe for experimentation.

The ones marked with * are my picks if you're looking:

Mongoose Metrics*
www.mongoosemetrics.com
UK, USA, Canada

Freespee*
www.freespee.com
UK, SE, FI, NO, DK LT, PL, IE, CV, SL, AT, NL, DE, UK

Adinsight*
www.adinsight.co.uk
UK

Infinity tracking*
www.infinity-tracking.com
UK

Optilead*
www.optilead.co.uk
UK

Switchboard free*
www.switchboardfree.co.uk
UK

Ifbyphone*
www.ifbyphone.com
USA

Freshegg*
www.freshegg.co.uk
UK

Jet Interactive*
www.jetinteractive.com.au
AUS

TheCallR*
www.thecallr.com
USA, Canada, UK, IT, FR, BE, ES, NL

Call tracking metrics
www.calltrackingmetrics.com/features
USA

Avanser
www.avanser.com.au
AUS

Hosted Numbers
www.hostednumbers.com
USA

Callcap
www.callcap.com
USA

Thanks Craig for the good overview of supported countries by each provider! I just would like to emphasize that for our part the list includes countries that Freespee has existing business partners in (as we are not in direct relationship with advertisers/SMEs). Technology-wise we cover most of Europe.

We also now have several partners in the U.S. now as well.

Best,
Juhani
@freespee

The trick with a good call tracking system is to ensure it can cut through the jargon that visitor level and keyword level call tracking can produce, and a helpful after sales service for custom report configuration is a must have too.

Nice post.

Thanks for sharing this kind of infomation I was looking the same and found your post I may be helpful for the latest technology for mobile phones.

Thanks Anna. 2013 marks time to bite the bullet and close the loop on lead tracking :) I am starting with Calltrackingmetrics and I love their Google API.

Aaron

I have a apartments.com sort of site I am launching and want to be able to track how many phone calls each apartment gets per month through our site. I dont want to pay the high price by ifbyphone for setup, buying numbers, carrying numbers and then paying 7.9 cents per minute after 750. All I want to do is see how many times a number is called. Is this doable?

Vous êtes Emarchand ou Retailer ?

Vous utilisez plusieurs leviers d'acquisition de trafic Online et Offline?

Choisissez Callsmap pour optimiser vos flux d'appels entrants et identifier quelles sont vos meilleures sources de visiteurs qualifiés !

http://www.callsmap.com/

AdInsight has rebranded as ResponseTap. Our Call-based Marketing Automation takes call tracking to another level and amplifies the depth and breadth of data across the end-to-end customer journey creating relevance and insight at every click. The addition of the telephone call to your online metrics lets you see the whole journey, ultimately improving the customer experience and enabling valuable sales attribution back to your marketing spend.

Since rebranding we’ve helped some of our clients:
• Increase online revenue by 30%
• Save 42% of marketing spend by reducing ineffective advertising
• Reduce PPC cost per lead by 80%
• Increase sales only calls by 120%

Take a look for yourselves: Responsetap.com

Understanding your customers offline and knowing what makes them take that decision helps create a stronger environment of trust. According to the research at Ringostat intelligent call tracking service, more than half of e-tailers’ transactions are made by phone, reaching 100% for some business models. Inbound phone calls are the huge source of customers and sales, yet underrated. Why does this happen, really?