Phone Conversion/Lead Tracking for Offline Businesses

Do you display a phone number on your website? Do you know how many of your website visitors call the number and where those visitors came from? Most businesses don’t track it, but it is very valuable to do so.

Case Study: ARBAccounting.com

Lets start with a case study: ARB Accounting is a local accounting business in Brisbane, Australia which I did a little marketing for (local search). Initially we had Google Analytics set up so we could see visits and traffic sources but we were not tracking phone conversions.

I came up with a solution to track phone calls by hiding the contact details and having visitors click it to reveal them. The solution uses javascript like this

onClick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/contact/phone'); swapText()".

It looks like this on the website –

The solution may look a little messy, but it gets the job done (and it’s free). There are paid solutions out there that may be cleaner, but I have not tried them so can’t recommend any. One example though is Mongoose Metrics.

The javascript function used to reveal the number is like this –

function swapText() {
document.getElementById("on1").style.display = "inline";
document.getElementById("off1").style.display = "none";
}

The full source code for the phone number itself is –

phone: <a href="#"onClick="javascript: pageTracker._trackPageview('/contact/phone'); swapText()" title="Click Here to Reveal">07 3379 <span id="off1">....</span><span id="on1" style="display: none;">1697</span><noscript>1697</noscript></a>

And the last step to set up the tracking is to add a goal in Google Analytics, a REGEX match goal for ‘/contact’ since in the website we are simulating page views on the /contact/phone page with pageTracker._trackPageview('/contact/phone').

Now that the website has good tracking set up we can analyze the data. The traffic sources > goals report shows that Google, direct and YellowPages brought all of the leads in the past 30 days.

We’ll want to drill down into those to find out more. Direct is simply people typing the domain name into their web browser. It turns out 75% of the YellowPages leads are actually spammers, not customers, and YellowPages costs $200 per month. So YellowPages sent 7 leads in the 30 days but 5 of them were spammers, only 2 legitimate customers – it’s time to drop YellowPages advertising. As for Google we will drill down further into keywords.

As you can see, there were 15 brand searcher leads and 8 non-brand searcher leads. The 8 non-brand searchers were due to my local marketing. At ~$110 per lead, my marketing brought in 8*$110=$880 of revenue for the month. I charge 20% commission, but only on the new sales generated by the local search marketing, so $880*20%=$176 commission for me.

A nice comparison to show the client is that YellowPages charges them $200 and only brought 2 leads. I charged $176 for 8 leads.