How To Capture Phone Sales In Your Tracking Stats
We drive a lot of traffic from a lot of different paid traffic sources, so we’re pretty particular when it comes to making sure that each conversion is tracked back to the correct traffic source.
Conversions are tracked back using tracking pixels or postback URLs that are placed on the “success” page that is displayed after someone completes an online order successfully.
This is especially important if you are driving traffic where you have selected a desired CPA rate to be hit. Both Google Adwords and Facebook Ads offer this CPA bidding feature and if conversions are not being sent back to these traffic source (via their tracking pixel), they won’t be able to optimize the campaign properly.
In some cases, this can be the kiss of death for your ad campaign if most people are clicking on a link and calling the phone number on your web site to place the order and never hitting the “success” page that fires these conversions back to the traffic source.
If the traffic sources are not seeing the conversions, they’ll assume you have poor conversions and reduce your traffic if your desired CPA rate is not being reached.
Because we spend a lot of money to attract new visitors (as much as 100,000 a day), it was important for us to come up with a method that would allow us to capture phone sale conversions and report them back to the traffic source.
One obvious method is to include a link in the order confirmation email that we send out to new customers that fire all the traffic pixels.
But not everyone opens their email confirmations or bothers to click on the links inside.
So what we end up doing was registering a memorable, short domain name that redirects to the success page and fires off all the tracking pixels.
We instructed our agents in the call center to tell people on the phone to visit the URL to complete their order and start the shipping process.
That’s it.
Yes, we still get the occasional grumpy customer who complains that they don’t want to visit any web page or they wouldn’t have called in the first place.
You can’t win them all, but we are able to capture close to 95% of all our sales and attribute them to the correct traffic source using this method.
Would love to hear your thoughts?
