This is one of the most common problems in SEO in measuring the success of an online marketing campaign. Most of the time, marketers can track clicks and all user interaction on the site including average time spent on site, pages viewed per visit, and the bounce rate. All these stats enable the marketer to make certain adjustments if elements of the marketing strategy are not functioning correctly. Data analysis is essential for a successful internet marketing strategy. But what do you do if you have the kind of business where your clients always want to call? They do not want to fill out a form, they do not want to send you an email, and they do not want to buy a product from you; they basically want to speak to you over the phone.

The problem with a phone call is that most of the time, it’s not trackable. You can ask the caller how they found you (Google, Referral Site, Yellow Pages) or get a dedicated number just for your website. Unfortunately, these do not solve the problem. You want to be able to see each phone call as a conversion on a “per keyword” basis. That’s the only way you can truly see which one of your marketing channels are performing, and which ones are not. A highly active site will have traffic coming in from major search engines (organic), from Pay Per Click Efforts (Adwords, Overture), from Affiliates, from Referral Sites, online directories, Social Media Profiles (Facebook, Myspace), Social Bookmarking and Newsletters. How is it possible to track phone calls all the way to these sources to see which ones are performing for your business? Well, it is possible.
We at Optimum7 are big fans of analytics and being able to track everything. Therefore, if you actually go to our homepage, you will see a “Click to Call” button which looks like this;

If you click this button, you will see that a new window opens, which looks like this;

This forwarder basically enables us to register this click as a “request for a phone call” on our database as well as analytics. By doing this, we also have the capability of digging all the way down to the sources of these “Click to Call” clicks months from now and analyze the success of a certain campaign.

Finally, this little script will forward to the following screen:

This is a service provided by RingCentral. The user enters their phone number and a timeframe they would like to receive a phone call. When they click the “Call” button, the system (costs about $20/month) will call you and inform you that you have a caller, and at the same time, ask the user to hold on the line for an available representative.

So, let’s say that you received 2000 unique visitors from Google in the past month and you registered 60 “Click to Call” requests on Analytics. That means you have a conversion rate of 6%, something you were not able to track before.

To implement “Phone Call Tracking on Analytics”, you do not need any complicated software. This can basically be implemented on any site. All you need is the RingCentral service ($20/month) and some customization. Similar services sell for over $2000 per year online.

For more information on Phone Call Tracking, you can contact us at 800-736-9618 and we will gladly assist you.