Anyone who runs an ecommerce business will tell you that it extremely hard to track where their phone sales are coming from. Some online retailers have upwards of 35% of their sales coming in over the phone. How do you keep track os these sales from an advertising perspective? What campaigns/keywords are not performing well? Here are two ways to track telephone sales properly.

Multiple Phone Numbers

High Level Tracking

The easy way to track phone sales on a high level is to get multiple phone numbers and set you website to display a different phone number based on the refering source. For example if  someone came from Google, show them one number — when someone come sfrom Yahoo, show another number etc… Now everytime someone calls you know where they originally came from.

Depending on your phone system, you should be able to display which line the calls come in from and then have your sales people enter a referring source into your system as they put the order through for the customer. As your system aggregates this info, you will know what your ROI is. Keep in mind that this can get as granular as you’d like, but it will be a pain to manage this for very many keywords/phone numbers. This solution works best at a very high level of tracking.

Tracking ID

Granular Tracking

If you have an in-house developer and would like more granular tracking, this is for you. Every time a unique visitor comes to your site generate a unique session ID and store their referring source in your database. You will then want to display this session ID on all pages of your site. The ID number should be short and easy to tell your sales representative over the phone.

When your sales reps take an order over the phone they should ask the customer to read them the session ID (call it Phone Tracking ID or something easy) which they will then input into your system with the order. Once your sales screen has this number it should mimic the customers cookie and send the relevant order info to your tracking pixels. When it does this, the customers original referring source as well as keywords or any other data that you track with the session ID will pass through and your will be able to see your ROI on a very granular level.

Bottom Line

If you just want tracking by channel or have very few campaigns, the first option is easy to set up and will work well for you. If you like granular data and have the development resources to go crazy, go for the second option.