Comments on: Tracking Offline Sales From Your Online Ads

By: Jurgen

Jurgen — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 14:14:47 +0000

Sounds like a great system. Thanks for writing about these call trackers – have been looking for something like it for a while now and never knew it existed!

By: Jacob

Jacob — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 14:59:19 +0000

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.

By: Adrienne Doss

Adrienne Doss — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 14:33:35 +0000

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.

By: Mike

Mike — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 02:53:37 +0000

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.

By: Ian Lee

Ian Lee — Sun, 06 May 2007 05:39:38 +0000

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!

By: Jonathan

Jonathan — Fri, 04 May 2007 16:58:44 +0000

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

By: Adrienne Doss

Adrienne Doss — Fri, 04 May 2007 16:49:39 +0000

Nice! I’ll have to check that out. ClickPath is definitely a little buggy.