Being avid followers of SEOmoz and the YOUmoz blog, we here at Fresh Egg got very excited when we read  that “Web Analytics Now Expands to Include Offline Phone Call Tracking” as far back as September last year. That post involving Mongoose Metrics got our pulses racing because it seemed to be an answer to one of our most persistent frustrations. As an SEO provider using analytics packages, we know our clients are getting sales calls. The frustrating reality has been that we can’t prove that those calls are due to the PPC or organic SEO work we are doing for them.  Mongoose had cracked the problem – but the service isn’t available in the UK. 

For any web business to be successful, our clients must have a clear understanding of how successful their advertising activities are. Whatever online sales model you adopt, you still need to know the answer to this question. As we all know, Google Analytics can track visitors from online referrers, including search engines, pay-per-click networks, email marketing and other digital marketing collateral, but there was no way to integrate one of the most common contact methods our client’s customers use – a telephone call. Imagine our depression then when, after very useful and highly informative conversations with those nice folks at Mongoose Metrics, we found out that there were no plans on their behalf to extend the service to the UK. That’s when we decided to attempt to develop something ourselves that would provide a similar level of integration.

We’ve just launched a tool called CallTrackID. The Fresh Egg team has spent several months working with a telecoms provider to develop the application, which was inspired by YOUmoz and is the brainchild of Fresh Egg SEO and analytics expert Nikki Rae and our programming team. CallTrackID enables call tracking from your website fully integrated with Google Analytics. Now we can track email enquiries, e-commerce sales and telephone calls, accurately identifying the referrer source for those telephone calls and relating them back to the online marketing activity.

It works like this: you decide which traffic avenues you want to track: e.g., Direct Hits, PPC, Organic or any other. Depending on the visitor’s route to site, they are shown different contact telephone numbers. When the number is called, it goes through a call management system that matches the call number with the predefined route and inputs that data into Google Analytics. So we can accurately identify the referrer source for those calls. All calls are routed to the client’s main phone lines, so they don’t need to change established sales procedures.

We believe CallTrackID is an extremely useful tool because it allows e-marketing providers to finally prove to their clients that the spend on their services is justified and profitable as the online campaigns are generating telephone call leads. It’s possible that CallTrackID may demonstrate that your chosen key phrase is not a lead-generating term. This allows you to move onto an alternative term, so it can also be a great tool for A/B testing keywords, ads and campaigns. You can track affiliate links, email campaigns, banner ads and any other digital collateral to see which channels are truly generating leads. This means you can confidently propose to clients measures to remove wastage and increase profit margin. And it’s all thanks to the moment of inspiration provided by YOUmoz!

CallTrackID can be implemented from as little as £25.00 per month (delivers five dedicated numbers). Fresh Egg is offering a free setup for the first 20 customers, after which there will be a small fee for setting up the tracking service. For more information, contact Adam Stafford, Nikki Rae or Dan Wotton at Fresh Egg. This is currently a UK service but we are looking to roll it out to other regions. We are currently looking into the rest of Europe and as far a field as Australia.