Tracking visitors to your website and measuring the success of your online ads and content has become a common task when trying to build your online presence. Several companies like Google, Yahoo, and WebTrends provide tools to aid this process. But how can you accurately gauge advertising ROI beyond the boundaries of your website? How do you know if you are making better investments placing ads in the newspaper, on the radio, or online?
Hosted Numbers has the solution, CallTracker, which lets you continue tracking your website’s success and advertising efforts beyond the internet. The concept is simple, yet the possibilities are endless.
Hosted Numbers provides you with unique phone numbers to place in your advertisements. When someone calls this number, Hosted Numbers collects information about the call including what number the call came from, what number they were calling, and how long the call lasted. Then, this information is sent to a webpage you’ve selected. From you online account interface (www.my.patlive.com), you can specify which information is sent to your page and how it is sent. Then, from your webpage, you can have this information sent directly to your analytics software. Now when you look at your analytics reports, you will have greater insight into ad response rates from your website and all advertising efforts that drive clicks as well as calls.
Setting up a webpage to capture your call information and sending it to your analytics software is simple. Create an empty webpage on your site that is not linked to from anywhere else on your site. Name it something meaningful, such as MyPhoneCalls.html, so it is easier to find in your analytics reports. A lot of websites are setup so that when you create a new page, a general shell is created with site common elements such as header, navigation, and footer. This shell often includes a standard code snippet to capture analytics data. If this is how your website is setup, then that is all you need. If not, then when you create an empty page make sure you include your basic analytics code snippet. For example, if you are using Google Analytics then your standard code snippet may look something similar to this:
< script type="text/javascript"> var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www."); document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E")); < script type="text/javascript"> try{ var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-xxxxxx-x"); pageTracker._trackPageview(); } catch(err) {}
Once you have your webpage in place, then you can log into your Hosted Numbers account to configure the URL.
Let’s take a look at setting up a URL for Google Analytics tracking. Google Analytics has several built-in URL parameters you can specify in custom URLs. If you want to set the Campaign Source, then you specify a value for the URL parameter utm_source. Hosted Numbers has provided an easy-to-use wizard for setting up your URL so you do not have to keep track of all of these parameters. We also provide the following specialized tags to make it easy to add dynamic content to the URL.
Available Specialized Tags:
Sample URL: http://www.yoursite.com/MyPhoneCalls.html?utm_source=[MAILBOX_NAME]&utm_medium=Phone&utm_content=[CALLER_ID]&utm_campaign=[PHONE_NUMBER]
Now, whenever someone calls one of your phone numbers, Hosted Numbers will hit this URL and it will be registered through Google Analytics. This adds an extra level of integrity to your analytics. Instead of just measuring the success of an ad based on a visitor clicking, you can now accurately measure the number of people that called as well.
