If you're old enough to know what the Yellow Pages are*, then you're probably old enough to remember adverts in them that said "Tell us you found us in the Yellow Pages and we'll give you an £5 off your first order" or something similar.
It wasn't just a marketing trick - it was a way (in fact, one of only a few ways) for companies back in the dim past before the internet came along, to track the ROI on their marketing spend. When you phoned up and placed your order, being sure to tell them where you found them for that £5 off - it was a lot of money in those days - someone, somewhere, would make a note that you'd been found through the Yellow Pages.
The problem that it sought to address is one that still exists today. We've talked a fair bit in recent months about tracking, though judicious use of Google Analytics, how your website's performance. If you sell online, there and then, then you're definitely in a good place - with a bit of effort, you can pick up your e-commerce data in Google Analytics, and see not just what people are buying, but how those people found you.
If, however, you aren't selling your goods or - more likely - your services online, then you will always have a disconnect between your website, and the initial enquiry, or the over-the-phone order, which makes it harder to track how the customer found you, where the sale came from, and thus where your advertising money is best spent. The underlying problem for most sites is that they're tracking visits, but they're not tracking actions.
If you fall into that category, read on, because in this blog post we're going to look at a few ways that you can redress the balance.
The low-tech methods
Ask the visitor - if they're getting in touch with you via your website's contact form, make sure it's got either a dropdown list (better for processing of bulk data) or a free text field where you can ask, and they can tell you, how they found you. If they're phoning in, once it becomes clear that it's their first time getting in touch, do the same. Create a central point where this data is collated and reviewed by those with responsibility for marketing spend decisions.
Use a dedicated telephone number - virtual telephone numbers are cheap, these days, and available in pretty much every region in the UK. Setting one up that is only used on your website, means that all incoming calls to that number can only have come from one place.
Use a dedicated email address - likewise, using a dedicated email address that is only used for incoming contact from your website allows you to better track incoming requests.
Use UTM tracking tags - these are added to the links to identify precisely where any incoming traffic from those links is arriving. Two elements are required - the source, and the medium. So, for example, a Mailchimp newsletter would have "mailchimp" as the source, and "email" or "newsletter" as the medium. The remaining elements are optional - the campaign identifies (in this example) precisely which newsletter the visitors is coming from. The term is for paid search traffic, identifying the term used to search for you, and the content is used to differentiate between links within campaign that each go to the same place (so a button, and a text link).
Use short links - the only issue with UTM tracking parameters is that whilst they're fine for online usage, they're impractical for any scenario where your customers would have to type in the URL. Short links - you'll almost certainly have seen bit.ly links, are a way of getting around this - the short link provider encodes your long, unwieldy, link into a short link - when the visitor clicks on, or types in, the short link, they are redirected to the long link version - this maintains the UTM tracking parameters, and their important information, without having to burden the visitor.
If you're not keen on using bit.ly (or similar) as the short link, for a small monthly outlay you could use your own, shortened, domain instead - so rather than thisismycompany.com/slink you could use timc.com/slink instead.
The mid-tech methods
Use specific landing pages - if you are running a specific campaign, perhaps with a specific offer, then the easiest way of tracking visitors arriving on your site for that campaign is to have them land on a specific landing page. This has the added benefit of allowing you to tailor your content to that campaign, cutting out any unrelated cruft. If, however, you're running many campaigns, then setting these up and administering them may prove problematic in the long term.
Use custom events - if you're using Google Analytics or Google Tag Manager, then with a bit of work, all the relevant interactions with your site - clicking on a phone number, clicking on an email address, filling out the contact form or downloading a brochure - whatever it is you want to drive your visitors towards doing - can be assigned to their own custom event. This fires, is passed through to Google, and can then be tied to conversions (on which more later).
The high-tech methods
These options almost always involve paying money to someone, so we won't go into a huge amount of detail, but solutions such as HubSpot allow you to track visitors individually from the moment they arrive on your site.
Valuing visitors
If you're using Google Analytics, and have set up conversion tracking, then each conversion needs to have a value. If you take 100 phone call enquiries in a month from your site, 10 of them result in a sale, and the average value of each sale is £20, then the value of a phone call, to you, is £2. Make sure that Google Analytics allocates a conversion value of £2 to a click on your call, and whilst - naturally - it won't be precisely accurate, it will, at the very least, give you a benchmark against which to measure.
The benefit of this is that growth is generally measured in relative, rather than absolute terms. If your phone conversions go from £100 / month to £200 / month, then whilst you don't know that that's precisely what they've generated for you, you do know that they've doubled in number.
In conclusion
As we said in our post last week, measure first, market second. Whilst those who don't sell directly online have a few more hurdles in their path, and cannot enjoy the delights of pretty much unfiltered, comprehensive, tracking data, with a little bit of effort, it's possible to get relatively close.
All websites, however, are finding themselves up against increasing numbers of web browsers, and browser extensions, blocking tracking scripts. So even if you can put data collection in place, it will not be complete and will have to be extrapolated out to a degree. But without knowing where you are, how can you hope to work out where you're going?
*My name? Yes, it's J. R. Hartley.
For the foundations of Google Analytics setup, see Master Google Analytics: Essential Insights for SMBs.
Once you're capturing the data, Google Looker Studio is the easiest way to bring it all into one place for reporting.
If you use Mailchimp, we also covered how to track Mailchimp revenue more effectively in Google Analytics.