How to track phone calls from your website

There are lots of things you can track as goals or events from your website through Google Analytics, including form submissions, downloads or PDFs, mailtos etc.

One of the big problems has been tracking phone calls that came through to your business as a result of people seeing your phone number on your website.

It’s a really important lead conversion event but for a long time tracking has only been possible via specialised companies such as www.jetinteractive.com.au who can – among other things – dynamically change the phone number on your site to identify where a phone call originated.

For small to medium business owners solutions like Jet Interactive’s might be a little out of reach.

Lately I’ve seen some really simple solutions to help with call tracking that I thought I’d share.

Realestate.com.au uses a great system to fire an event to their analytics account when they hope a phone call is about to be made.

They simply hide the phone number behind a link that you have to click to reveal the phone number and that click fires off a conversion to their analytics account.

Another really good example is from an accounting company in Queensland.

As you can see, you need to click on the first part of the phone number to reveal the rest of it.

When the click occurs it is recorded in Google Analytics. There’s a case study about how this was done on the above website here at https://www.marketinghub.info/phone-conversionlead-tracking-for-offline-businesses/. It includes all the code to get you going.

While it won’t be 100% accurate because I’m sure some people will click the link but not call you but it should give you an idea in your analytics account.

Below is a screenshot which cross references the source of the traffic to the site and phone call click events.

Understanding which sources of traffic have delivered active phone leads helped the owner of the business to make informed decisions about whether to continue advertising with Yellow Pages for example.

That’s powerful tracking and very easy for any developer to implement.

Thanks to Daniel Brady from https://www.marketinghub.info for agreeing to let me use some of the material from his case study this week.

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Chris Thomas heads up Reseo, a search engine optimisation  company which specialises in creating and maintaining Google AdWords campaigns and Search Engine Optimisation campaigns for a range of corporate clients.