Web Analytics India

Phone Tracking: Mongoose Implementation with Omniture Site Catalyst

- Contributed by Robin Browne

One of our clients operates a website that caters to an audience seeking legal help and puts them in touch with lawyers best suited to serve their needs. What happens is that:

• A visitor arrives
• Checks around for a lawyer that matches their requirement
• Clicks on a button that shows them a Phone No. to call

Then, it pretty much went out of our hands. Visitor calls up the lawyer or not, we have almost no idea. There was no way of quantifying the value of our referrers and keywords beyond the conversion rate of people clicking on the Phone call number button on site.

Then we heard of a company called Mongoose Metrics, they provide a phone service in which you get a bank of numbers and whenever they are called, a specified web page is loaded. The idea is that this web page can contain your tracking script and you can capture information like duration of call, number being called etc.

Now, what needs to happen on our site is that whenever a visitor clicks on the button for the phone number, one of those phone numbers is presented for them to call.

Matching to Online Data

After capturing the phone call data, we go back and see to which session this phone number was presented. Now this can be problematic. Because we don’t have an infinite number of phone numbers, it becomes almost impossible to give a unique phone number to every visitor that wants to call. So you would need to do some kind of number provisioning where you would recirculate a batch of phone numbers, this allows you to correlate phone data with online data with a degree of confidence. The more numbers the better of course.

According to Mongoose Metrics, “Our customers are reporting needing pools of 20 to 60 tracking numbers which is about $100 to $300 in monthly cost. ”

Upside

The same reason why a lot of people clamour for CPL figures instead of CPC. And it especially makes sense for businesses where converted leads deliver a disproportionate amount of business. Imagine you’re lawyer, 99% of people looking at your website may deliver no business at all. But the few who do make it profitable to be in business.

The benefits of doing this would be to allow you calculate your ROI on marketing campaigns using a more tangible action, i.e. a phone call, than a click on the site that may not lead to any action.

Note

The results for us so far have been positive. Although I am still wary about scaling up. And be sure that we will keep you updated on how it goes.

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