Mild-mannered webmaster by day …
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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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6 Responses for "Tracking Offline Sales From Your Online Ads"
We went with Voicestar because it only took 1 day to set up and didn’t have the large margin of error associated with clickpath’s number swapping methodology. These guys are great, and even private label the analytics dashboard
Nice! I’ll have to check that out. ClickPath is definitely a little buggy.
Wow, nice to see a post about this topic and to hear that services actually cater to this market. It reminded me of a system I coded before Google and Overture even began offering conversion tracking. It was a simple but effective way of using tracking URL’s and cookies to show a “Promo Code” beside the telephone number. The Promo Code was tied to a 4-digit code based on the ad and search engine the user was coming from. Promo Code seemed more important so users would remember to quote it more often. But the trick was to train call center reps to actively ask for this tracking code on every incoming sales call. We even began testing a php version versus a javascript version. Depending on how the system was implemented, one would work better than the other.
I developed it to a point where this tracking system was incorporated into the affiliate platform and a unique Promo Code (corresponding to an affiliate) would be displayed beside the toll free number if an affiliate sent in a user through their affiliate link.
Awesome post that brought back alot of good memories. Thanks!
Voicestar is a pay per call service. They offer a different product than Clickpath.
It is funny that you mention a “large margin of error” associated with the “number swapping methodology”. The patent pending dynamic number insertion that is the driving force behind ClickPath is exactly what allows ClickPath to do what it does.
well I haven’t found any ‘bugs’ in clickpath so far. what I have found is that any marginal data wqs because I hadn’t coded something. setup is a little more tedious than Voicestar, which I used before, but if you want to see the actual keyword, and not just an Ad Group (Voicestar) that drove each call, that it is a small price to pay. Actually Clickpath only took me 2 days to fully implement, but then again, I was committed to getting it done.
Re: ClickPath bugginess, I’ve noticed some problems in the reporting. For example, the “Conversions by Referring Domain” report says that every phone call is from “undefined”, despite the thousands of clicks coming in from Google and Yahoo alone.
I asked my customer service rep about this, and she never got back to me. She has since left the company, so maybe the new rep will be a bit more attentive.
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