Tracking Your Online ROI by Tracking Phone Calls

[bhartzer]

If you've got an ecommerce site then you are probably aware of where your online sales come from and where people hear about your site. Like many online merchants use Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising as well as other online and offline advertising options such as print, radio, or television advertising. If someone searches at Google, clicks on your PPC ad, and comes to your site to make a purchase, then most likely you’re tracking that information. But do you have a toll free phone number on your web site? If you have a toll free phone number, did you know that you can track your PPC campaigns as well? Voicestar is one company that allows you to track all of the phone calls to your business and know exactly where you’re getting the greatest ROI, whether it’s from print ads, organic search results, PPC ads, or even a printed catalog.

Voicestar offers the ability to display different phone numbers via JavaScript on a web site depending on where someone came from (PPC, direct to the site, organic search (even a particular phrase). If someone comes from a Google organic search, the phone number displayed on the search will change. Phone numbers can be changed, and phrases that are displayed on the site can be changed as well depending on the referrer. A lot of data can be tracked and certain information, even the call itself, can be saved for future reference.

According to the Voicestar web site, The Voicestar “call reports accurately quantify marketing efforts, helping you make smarter decisions and negotiate media rates based upon performance.” You can… “reallocate underperforming ad dollars to programs that generate real results, increase response to your marketing efforts by using easy-to-remember vanity and repeater numbers”, even “map the geographic location of all calls, and overlay with demographic information.

Merchants use a secure login and look at their own accounts or set up sub-accounts to track data. This is also offered as a private label option, so agencies and search marketing firms can also benefit by providing this option to their customers. Merchants can see data for each campaign, referrer, and more by setting up certain tracking parameters. Ads can be assigned to Groups. You can track paid search versus natural search results, for example.

Certain reports are set up automatically, while others can be configured to be emailed on a regular basis.
Calls can be tracked by their status: good calls, voicemail calls, hangups, are all tracked, and all the Caller ID information is saved. The calls themselves can be saved for future reference, and the calls can be heard through your PC’s speakers. Certain “groups” can be set up: you can assign certain types of calls to certain groups and see which ads out of the group are producing results. Some of the reports allow you to compare certain campaigns (reports can be emailed daily, weekly, monthly). Data is pulled if there is activity. Some of the types of reports that are available include an ad report, a user report, a top callers report, a top zip codes report, an ROI calculator, a calls by hour report, and a user access log report.

Setting up tracking parameters is all done through a web interface and be tracked easily--the campaign name, the group, the status (active, not active, etc.) the inbound phone number, and the forward number (where the 800 phone number is forwarded to) can all be set up. Each campaign can be set to forward to another phone number or you can set it to configure it to forward to a one general phone number.

Voicemails can be sent to an email address, as well as missed calls, what Voicestar calls “good calls” (connected calls) can be emailed (typically just a notice that a call was received is sent via email). A whisper can be added to calls, as well. For example, a whisper can be added before the call is connected that telling the merchant that a call is coming from your Google campaign).

A lot of the information about calls is saved for future use, including the caller ID information, campaign, duration, time, and the status of the call. Reverse lookup can also be used for mailing purposes, whereas the callers’ name, address, and location of the call is saved.

Click to call is also an option. For example, a web site might want offer an option for someone to “call me now”. In this case, the web site has an online form and the site’s visitor enters their phone number.

If you have your phone number on your web site and receive calls for orders, then you’re not taking advantage of all the tracking capabilities that are available. If someone uses the web to search for a product that you sell, they find your web site and pick up the phone and call you then you won’t know whether they clicked on a Pay Per Click ad at Yahoo! or Google. However, by implementing a solution like one from Voicestar you can track those customers. The more you can track the better; if aren’t tracking all of the ways customers can contact you and purchase your products then you just aren’t seeing the “big picture”.

[keywordguy]

Hi Bill, this is one of the best implementations I've seen or heard of using what I'm assuming is voice over IP to track PPC click through use and the call generating capability of a specific website.

While many companies have been trying to figure out the value of click to talk or clicked call technology, the ability to set up phone numbers for specific Web campaigns is awesome.

Thanks for sharing this information Bill, I will be checking out VoiceStar technology this week.

[bhartzer]

keywordguy, you could actually resell this voicestar service to all of the sites listed in your yellow pages--you can assign a separate phone number for each one and charge them separately.

[souravamant]

This is indeed a great a tool to have for marketig dept. But still I am bit fishy about choosing it. Can you recommend me few more such kinds of tools. Before landing up into any kind of decision I wanted to check around few more.

Your thoughts....

[samplevoice]

There are many call tracking providers out there and price points have gone down considerable thanks to some of the newer VoIP-based providers.

The leaders in the field include:

eStara -- www.estara.com
Who's Calling -- www.whoscalling.com
Call Source -- www.callsource.com
Ingenio -- www.ingenio.com

Of these, eStara and Ingenio specialize in pay for performance applications, in print and offline campaigns.

[bhartzer]

There are many call tracking providers out there

Yes, there are--thanks for that list, it's very helpful.

But, keep in mind that you don't have to use a call tracking provider--you could do limited tracking yourself by getting an 800 number or even using a separate phone number to track people who find you from your website versus your print advertising.

Pay Per Call is a whole other story altogether: the phone number appears in your ad and doesn't direct someone specifically to your website (it gives them a phone number to call instead of a URL). With call tracking, though, you can show a different phone number on the website based on the referrer.

[adverlicious]

Confusing as it is, there's still more.

Some providers offer "click-to-connect" services. From a site or banner, a prospect enters their phone number and some profile info (as much or as little as desired) ... and then the advertiser proactively calls them in real-time.

It may sound like overkill, but it does overcome user inertia by instigating a call while their interest is piqued. I'd rather have a call *now* than the intention to call once I'm finished my research -- by which point I'll get distracted, lose the phone number, etc.

Estara and others offer this ...

[Time Clock Guy]

These solutions get really close, and maybe it is enough, but I'd like to know if I can tie in calls to the 800 number to track back to my google analytics.

So lets say someone is searching for employee payroll solutions, decide they would like to buy biometric time clocks for their company, they are at our site but they decide rather than hunt for the answers, they pick up the phone and call.

Our salesperson does not want to tell them "please go click on the little happy face" or some such, because it doesn't "feel right" to them. Frustrating to me, because that is the easiest way to get my google analytics to track the sale, and to give spot-on feedback from website optimizer.

But not to give up easily I am looking for other ways to tell my server that the current visitor just called.

As you suggested above I can get my 800 provider to geo-map who called, so that even if I have several visitors currently with a session, theoreticall I can identify the one who called.

There is a global.asa file that I can access to tell me how many users are currently at the site, and in the case of overlapping users I can have a different 800 number ring for each to keep them separated.

But what I am looking for: is there anyway to manually go in to the server and tell it that a user clicked something? Or for that matter is there a way to add manual edits to the urchin tracking data (analytics and web optimiser A/B tests)?

I have a feeling my real answer is to think of a reason the sales person will WANT to get the caller to click an "i called" tracking icon. But if anyone else has had success trying to do anything similar I'd love to hear about it

Eric

[bhartzer]

but they decide rather than hunt for the answers, they pick up the phone and call

That's where an online solution like this is perfect. Based on the referring URL (for example, they did a search at Google, clicked your PPC ad, and came to your site), a different phone number will be displayed. For example, if the person came directly to your site then one phone number would be displayed on the site. If they came from Google PPC then another number is displayed. And if they came from Yahoo! PPC another phone number is displayed on the site.

There's really no clicking on a certain part of the site and the salesperson doesn't have to ask them where they came from or how they heard about your company. You, the marketer, will know exactly where they came from because another phone number is displayed--there's no guessing or asking the customer at all.

The more phone numbers you add to the tracking account (they're only a few dollars per month), the more unique variables you can track.

[PPCProGuy]

Originally Posted by bhartzer

keywordguy, you could actually resell this voicestar service to all of the sites listed in your yellow pages--you can assign a separate phone number for each one and charge them separately.

This could also be done with Who's Calling. They provide unlimited toll free numbers and only charge for usage. This is great for companies like you that want to give each advertiser a unigue TFN to advertise with you.

[PPCProGuy]

Since you are shpping for a system to track online PPC Campaigns to offline conversions, you may want to look at Clickpath also. These are the only 2 systems that even do online to offline conversion tracking, so you might as well. There are pro's and con's to each, namely Price and Detail. In my experience Voicestar is a little cheaper at first, but they provide a little less detail than Clickpath. Good Luck in your search.

[PPCProGuy]

Originally Posted by bhartzer

That's where an online solution like this is perfect. Based on the referring URL (for example, they did a search at Google, clicked your PPC ad, and came to your site), a different phone number will be displayed. For example, if the person came directly to your site then one phone number would be displayed on the site. If they came from Google PPC then another number is displayed. And if they came from Yahoo! PPC another phone number is displayed on the site.

There's really no clicking on a certain part of the site and the salesperson doesn't have to ask them where they came from or how they heard about your company. You, the marketer, will know exactly where they came from because another phone number is displayed--there's no guessing or asking the customer at all.

The more phone numbers you add to the tracking account (they're only a few dollars per month), the more unique variables you can track.

Yes, Voicestar does exactly that...tracks the cource the call came from. To be fair, Clickpath takes it to a more granular level in telling you WHICH keyword drove that phone call. If you are paying $3.00 per click for a keyword that gets 100 clickthroughs per day and 10 conversions, wouldn't you want to be able to compare that to another keyword that you pay $.10 per click, gets 1000 clicks per day and gets 0 converstions (this = $0.00 in revenue)?

To my knowledge, Clickpath does that out of the box. With Voicestar, you have to buy a whole bunch of toll free numbers to be able to answer that question. Hope that helps your evaluations.