How to measure phone calls on your website

Measuring Your Performance

The saying goes ‘half of your advertising is wasted, you just don’t know which half!’ as mentioned by many great marketers including the doyen Gerry Harvey, and that goes for most not knowing exactly what’s working and what’s not. To continually improve the performance of your marketing dollars you need to have a strong measurement plan to work out which half you should keep.

One common issue for online marketers is measuring the many ways a website visitor can convert into a lead. They may fill out a signup form, they may hit the ‘contact us’ button, or call the phone number displayed. Measuring all of the online forms and buttons is easily achieved by online data analysis but measuring the phone calls from your website can get tricky.

You could keep the phone number hidden behind a button or something similar, and when the user clicks on it you can measure the amount of times the number was requested. However this isn’t actually tracking the call, it only measures the fact that the user has seen the number. This method is obviously not favoured by most. Marketers have a big problem with results like this, as its creating another barrier to sales enquiries. Marketing should be about removing as many barriers as possible to make a sales enquiry as easy as possible.

To resolve this many marketers use a Phoneword on a website which is specifically used online and nowhere else. This allows easy use of call tracking software integrated with your CRM tool like Salesforce to track these calls from your website and attribute them to your online marketing efforts.

If you want to get even more sophisticated you can use ‘source detection’ or ‘campaign detection’ and have the website show a different Phoneword based on the source or campaign. You could show a different Phoneword for;

• Social Media Activities
• Adwords Enquiries
• Brand Vs Non-Brand in Adwords
• The list is endless…

Now you don’t need to worry about ‘bleeding’ sales enquiries from your online channels. You can use readily available tools to help you work out which half of your marketing budget is working. And if you are like me, you won’t just save the other half; you will start spending more on the channels that are working!

Good luck, and if you want tracking for your incoming phone calls on your website please get in touch.