Case Study: Technology Firm Uses Phone Tracking to Determine Website ROI

Published July 2, 2015 | Categories: Case Studies

Challenge: Our client wanted to better understand the impact the website was having with respect to inbound calls to its Call Center. The majority of the conversions actually occurred at the Call Center versus online. A better understanding of the source and geographic location of call center conversions stemming from their website would help to maximize the ROI from their web initiatives. How can this be achieved?

Business Solution: Effective phone tracking needed to be installed to identify both the location that the user was calling from and the source that led the user to the website. This required displaying a unique phone number to cover each of the many combinations of location and source. With four different office locations (East, West, Midwest, and North) combined with five different potential user sources (organic, PPC campaign 1, PPC Campaign 2, PPC Campaign 3, and all other traffic), a total of twenty unique scenarios needed to be setup and managed.

Each scenario utilizes a unique number obtained from the phone tracking company. When each of these numbers is called, the company logs a phone call to that number and reroutes that call to the client’s primary phone number. Using JavaScript code, these numbers are dynamically inserted into the web page in a specific area such that each user sees a number that represents the region and source. For example, when a user arrives at the site via an organic search and calls the North office, information associated with that specific combination is updated in Google Analytics accordingly. Hence, phone traffic can be easily analyzed alongside web traffic thanks to the integration of phone tracking with Google Analytics.

Unfortunately, the out-of-the-box code offered by the phone tracking company could only account for locations or for source, but not both. Beacon worked with the vendor’s developers to create customizable JavaScript code that could handle multiple variables and display dynamic numbers to bridge this gap.

Results:  Custom code was implemented and successfully accounted for twenty different call combinations of user source and locations. Over a six month span, over 2000 phone calls were logged and attributed as customer contact goal conversions for the client. In the short term, this data was used to optimize the company’s PPC budget between the lesser performing campaigns and the more successful ones. Over a longer span, the client used this data to help determine the need for physical office locations in each region.