8 Methods for Tracking Phone orders from Search
28th February 2008
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Here are 8 methods you can use for tracking phone orders that were initiated by Search. 1) Create a unique landing page with a unique 800# for Google, Yahoo, MSN respectively. 2) Generate a unique “promo code” by placing all your keywords in a database and assign them an individual ID. Then when the user clicks on the Google url, it will attach a string to the URL like: keyword=12345. The unique ID can be the promo code that appears on the webpage. 3) By adding a unique customer reference code (promo code) on the page, and the reps on the phone can ask for that number. Train the sales reps to record and report the “lead source”. 4) The Landing page can encourage visitors to print a discount coupon, which can be redeemed at local stores. The Landing page could encourage prospects to find their local store and redeem their discount coupon. 5) Possibly utilize an 800# with an IVR phone system for tracking. Great Expectations, Inc. used an IVR system to track phone calls. The cost of their IVR was $.35 per minute. 3% of all their leads came from the IVR system. 6) Integrating your frontend/backend with your Conversion & Tracking software, and enabling an API to track the sales amount generated per keyword & the spend on that keyword. 7) Use Pay-Per-Call. No related posts. |
Use tracking software from a company that specializes in 
February 28th, 2008 at
Awesome post. I like the 1 and 2. I never really thought of drilling down to calls by keyword (or even by search engine). I still deal with mostly small time clients, so having a unique number on the site is usually enough (if they called that number, obviously they got to your site, that’s the only place it’s listed). But now I really wanna play with these ideas.
February 29th, 2008 at
In one of the companies I worked for we always struggled with how to track the revenue from phone calls.
One of the things that we tried was to have them create a survey at the end of each sales call and slip in the question of “Which keyword did you find us?” and “which engine did you find us on?”
March 1st, 2008 at
8b) eStara is a click-to-call vendor that also tracks conversions from phone calls.
March 4th, 2008 at
The methods you describe are “hard tracking” systems where physical data elements (or coupon counts) are joined with keywords, etc. While useful in most circumstances (keep in mind that most customers might not “comply” with the tracking method — keep/use the promo code or phone #, etc.), hard tracking methods can also be enhanced through “soft tracking” as well. By soft tracking, I mean doing a statistical / econometric analysis that correlates variations in search with variations in other conversion channels (phone orders). While this does not push the value of offline conversions down to the keyword level, it does give an indication of the overall worth of paid search to in-bound telesales. And it doesn’t require much set-up …
Regards, Pat
May 10th, 2008 at
There is a company called Keymetric (www.keymetric.net) that does exactly this. Their campaign analytics applications tracks telephone calls back to the exact keyword, and amazing enough the exact search term query that generated the telephone call.
We have been using them for about 4 months and the return is amazing. We now know which keywords and campaigns are generating conversions, even phone calls, and can optimize accordingly.
They have some great other applications and tools as well.
I highly recommend them.
February 25th, 2009 at
Anything that relies on manual processing by sales agents, is unreliable at best. I’ve yet to see this method work accurately.