Mild-mannered webmaster by day …
photo credit: givepeasachance
My company sells medical equipment online, but only a tiny fragment of purchases are actually ordered from the website. The vast majority of our sales are made over the phone. For years, we struggled with tracking our ROI because we were never really sure which keywords led to browsers and which led to buyers.
We discussed several ways to handle this problem. We asked the sales reps to simply ask the customers how they found our website. But many customers said they couldn’t remember, or just said they found us on Google and couldn’t remember exactly what they searched for. We considered adding a tracking variable tied to a cookie that would be displayed on the corner of the page, which the customer could then read to the sales rep. But we didn’t have the technical know-how to make this happen, and the idea was forgotten.
Then one day, I got a cold call from a sales rep at Who’s Calling. I was extremely skeptical at first, because I get several cold calls a week from shady SEO firms. But I’m glad I stayed on the phone, because we finally found exactly what we had been looking for: a way to track exactly which ads generated phone leads.
The service is called ClickPath. It can track conversions from any medium, including ad networks like Google AdWords, newsletters, e-mail campaigns and even print advertisements. The secret lies in dynamically generated phone numbers. For example, a customer who clicked an ad for “hospital beds” on Google would see a different phone number than a customer who searched for “exam tables” on Yahoo! You can also designate a phone number especially for a newspaper or magazine ad, so you know that all calls coming from that phone number are for that particular ad.
First, you have to add a bit of JavaScript code to your website wherever your regular phone number appears. Then, you have to tag all of your keywords with a set of tracking variables. The tracking variables let you know:
Set-up is pretty easy, but it’s a little tedious if you have thousands of keywords on multiple ad networks. I highly recommend the use of a spreadsheet and the concatenate function to make the process a little more efficient. And once you slog through the set-up process, the results you receive are worth the trouble.
Using ClickPath, I have been able to figure out which keywords generate solid leads and which generate junk calls. I’ve not only refined our keyword lists, but also saved a lot of money from our advertising budget. As an added bonus, we can also record every call that comes in through a ClickPath number, so our sales manager can listen to calls and train our sales reps on better sales techniques.
The application is entirely web-based, so you can check your statistics from any computer. It runs a little slow at times, but it’s a very robust interface with tons of ways to view, sort and export the data. Customer service has generally been very friendly and responsive. So despite a few minor kinks in the system, I would definitely recommend ClickPath for any online business that does a significant amount of offline business.
If you have any questions about ClickPath or want to talk about your own experience with the application, please feel free to leave a comment!
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