Justinblase.com

Online businesses (the smart ones anyway) have been tracking clicks for several years.  The information provided by common analytics applications allows companies to not only understand where their visitors are coming from and what they are doing upon arrival, it provides webmasters a deeper understanding of opportunities for improvement and lends insight to strategies that are currently effective.

Tracking conversions online is simple with common, out of the box analytics packages like Google Analytics if you are lucky enough to define your conversion as an e-commerce purchase or visit to a particular website page… but if the goal of your site is to generate a phone call, unfortunately it’s not as easy to track.

Many webmasters settle on tracking the number of page views of the contact page as a “good enough” metric for determining site visits that generate phone calls… but there is a much more effective method.

In order to get a true measurement of  “phone call conversions” one should set up a couple virtual phone numbers that are set up to simply forward to your regular business phone.  Most companies that offer these are able to provide statistics on the number of times each unique number is dialed, which provides valuable insight into which pages site visitors are “converting to callers” from.  Many carriers offer these virtual numbers for $10 or less per month.

From here on out, consider using different virtual phone numbers on different marketing campaigns to allow for more specific lead generation tracking.  It may cost your company an additional $50 a month, but it’s a safe bet that after a couple months you will be amazed by the data and will have a more “clear focus” going into the future.