The metrics we use to judge the performance and success of our websites have progressed down the years.
Initially it was all about quantity; how many visits you were getting to your website, usually monitored with a small hit counter that you proudly published on your website.
The number of visits to a website then suddenly became 2nd place to search engine rankings, with this new thing called “SEO” gaining widespread popularity, where people tried to gain search engine visibility without real consideration for anything else.
Those were the dark days in comparison to now, however; as Google Analytics became much more advanced, and other tools started gaining more popularity, our thirst for metrics was propelled, and the simplistic figures that would once suffice were now no longer good enough.
Skipping forward to today, most smart marketers realize it’s about quality over quantity, and conversions over visitor numbers.
Although setting up goals in Analytics (and similar) have become second nature, people still aren’t taking full advantage of the tools at their fingertips – such as monitoring all leads generated via the online marketing efforts that are carried out.
The one key metric I’m going to talk about here is telephone conversions.
Although people have switched from phone books to search engines, a large majority of visitors to websites will still most likely pick up a phone to call your business as opposed to filling out a 3-field contact form.
1. Establishing Phone Number Visibility
Before you begin tracking the calls you’re receiving via the website, you need to ensure your phone number is actually visible.
I’ve lost count the amount of times I’ve visited a website to find a phone number, only to be left utterly confused (and often angered if it’s a customer service related issue).
In order to ensure people can easily find your company phone number, follow some of these simple on-site tips:
- Out front and centre – It may seem obvious, but you need to make sure your phone number is large and visible.
Include it in a common header file (if you have one) so it’s visible no matter what page the user is on.
Also make sure it can be seen on the home page.
- Departmental separation – Just because you have 10 different departments doesn’t mean you shouldn’t display a generic phone number.
Reduce the confusion for visiting users by providing one primary number they can view and dial.
If you have separate departments, then that’s fine also, just make sure they are correctly labelled on the appropriate page, so people know which one to contact for each individual issue.
- Microformats – An increase in search engine usage of semantic mark-up means microformats are becoming very important.
Use the hCard microformat to mark-up your contact details (including phone number) on your website contact page.
- Footer – Include your company phone number within the footer of your website where possible, as people will often scroll to the bottom of the page before deciding whether or not to contact you.
2. Tracking Phone Conversions the Manual Way
To begin tracking calls received via the telephone is relatively simple in theory – especially if you’re doing it the manual way without integrating it into your online measurement tools.
Most CRM systems (and similar) will have fields for types of phone calls, and you can ensure your receptionist is asking incoming callers where they found the website so that they can note this information down.
The data generated through this process can then be compiled and exported from the system at the end of the month, and appended to an online performance report to begin making some assessments.
This process is tedious, however, and ultimately won’t provide a lot of data due to the inability to track search terms, content visited, and incoming traffic sources accurately.
3. Tracking Phone Conversions the Integrated Way
Taking the above step a little further, you can actually begin integrating offline data capture with online measurement packages, such as Google Analytics.
The benefit of Analytics is that it allows you to use URL parameters to specific data sources (used in things such as email marketing campaigns), meaning more specific data can be yielded from the people manning the phones in your company.
To do this step is a little “filthy” – ie. it isn’t exactly the most elegant solution, but it kind of works.
You will either need to build a small web interface, or a custom Excel spreadsheet that provides a series of drop-down options or check boxes that can be asked to the caller when they ring.
These options – once populated – will then be appended to the custom URL that is associated with your website.
Once the form is completed, a button could be generated that submits the URL to the website, which ultimately gets picked up by Google Analytics, and tracked.
The URL could look similar to the below:
Tip
Use Google’s Analytics URL Builder to accurately compile tracking URLs.
A separate profile would ideally be setup in Google Analytics to effectively separate the standard online data being recorded from the offline calls, to ensure the data isn’t skewed.
4. Tracking Phone Conversions the Automated Way
If you, like most people, want to avoid such a tedious and manual process such as the ones listed above – then there are automated solutions (thankfully!).
Phone call analytics packages such as AdInsight are available to accurately measure the phone call conversions being made via your website, and this is much more of an advisable approach unless you really want to get into the nuts and bolts of things with one of the above solutions.
Phone call analytics are specifically designed to track incoming call data as standard visitor data would typically be tracked, and this is all fed back into Google Analytics to be combined with the rest of your data.
The only downside to this approach is that the phone number is often changed on your website in order to monitor the individual users who are visiting.
This means that you lack consistency from a brand point of view, but the tracking of the people who phone your company via the website then becomes almost completely accurate.