Measuring Paid Sources By Phone

If your web site exists to inspire visitors to call you, then standard web analytics packages are useless. All that standard web analytics will tell you is that people visited, not that they called.

Very small businesses, where the owner is likely to take the call, can make sure to ask the caller how they found the phone number. Make a record of the sources that people report and compare it with your clicks to get some idea of the performance and the cost per action.

You can go a step further, and use a technique that is effective for larger companies, by having an extension or department on the web site. Then when people ask for that extension or department, you know where they saw the information.

For larger businesses, or for SME’s where the precise source of a lead is important, such as when affiliate commission should be given for leads or conversions, an effective technique is to customise the phone number on the web site so that calls come in on different numbers according to the cause of the call. With the right software on the web server, you can feed a phone number that reflects how the user came to the web site, so when they call that number, you know without asking just what happened.

Despite the importance of this technique, it is rarely offered in web application servers and usually is not addressed by graphically oriented web designers. It’s not hard to do, and the performance measurements you get will help you to improve ROI and focus your attention on the aspects of the site that help turn visitors into callers.