The use case
Are you running ads and want to understand the advertising campaigns and channels that make customers pick up their phone and call your business?
Have you done your research and ended up considering purchasing a pricing plan on one of those 3rd party call tracking & analytics software?
We are here to tell you that this is not necessary!
With the power of Google Tag Manager and a bit of coding imagination, we at Click-wise are able to set up call tracking for paid ads on our own.
If you are curious to learn the basics of how we do it, continue reading.
The approach
People enter your website via various channels -organic, paid, some may know it from offline ways-, there is no easy way to identify which channel has brought a caller to your business. And let’s be honest, asking them during the call feels a bit awkward and time consuming.
So how will we differentiate the people that called your business by clicking on a paid ad from the rest?
Let’s say your business phone number that appears in your website is 210 55 555 555.
What if you had a second phone number, not publicly available, i.e. 210 77 777 777, which would appear in your website in the position of your regular one, 210 55 555 555, each time a website visitor entered via a paid ad.
But how is this possible?
Let’s take for example advertising via Google Ads.
When you see in the Web an advertisement of Google and you click on it, you are taken to the business’ website. If you pay attention to the landing page URL, you will be able to see some weird appended parameters. For example, https://www.businesshomepage.com?gclid=a89ffahfu0fhwFAIEFATY54355636UEFUSFO
This gclid parameter is a Google Ads identifier and is appended to the landing page URL each time a website visit from a Google advertisement happens (provided that the marketer has configured correctly some settings inside Google Ads platform).
With the use of Google Tag Manager (free tool installed on your website’s code that allows us to track website traffic, website events/conversions, etc.) we can identify the visitors that enter via Google paid ads by looking at this gclid parameter.
Each time such a visitor lands in the business website, Google Tag Manager is triggered and it automatically changes the website phone number from 210 55 555 555 to 210 77 777 777 instantly by modifying the HTML code of your website only for that website visitor and only for that specific website session she/he initiated.
Thus every time your phone (with the number 210 77 777 777) rings, you will know that this is a person that learned about your business via your paid advertising efforts.
2) The gclid parameter is appended to the landing page URL.
3) Google Tag Manager is activated in your website.
4) Google Tag Manager changes the phone number instantly.
5) The user/visitor sees the new (modified) phone number and calls.
The same approach can be used for other channels, too.
The secondary phone number can be an additional landline or mobile number by your phone provider or even a phone call forwarding number (these are cloud-based phone numbers that forward the call to a number of your choice and simultaneously provide call tracking analytics).
One can also apply even more complex creative technical ideas depending on the level of know-how (knowledge of using 1st party cookies, sessionStorage, server side tracking, etc.).
We are not going to reveal the exact details of how we set up the aforementioned technical implementations, but as you can understand…
…in Click-wise we have all the integrated know-how to provide such phone call tracking solutions for paid advertising, custom and tailor-made to your business needs.
