I thought I'd blog about our most recent release in the Semify Agency Portal. We did a preview for the SEO reseller team last week in our white label phone tracking webinar. It's short, you should give it a watch to see the SEM software in action. We are pleased to be pushing our phone tracking capabilities forward as we know this is a critical marketing activity. If you've been following us for long, you know we're big on metrics. You can't manage what you don't measure.
Marketing has traditionally been a field where measurement has been difficult. But online marketing is different. We are able to track clicks, referrals, and have awesome things such as cookies. But what about phone calls? Phone calls have always been difficult to track because when the user picks up the phone, you lose access to their cookies, referrer and url variables... At least you used to!
What is phone tracking?
Simply put, phone tracking allows you to use additional phone numbers for tracking purposes while having all phone numbers ring at the same place... Confusing definition? I think so. An example is probably best. Please see the table on our new screen in the Semify Agency Platform below that shows phone calls by their MEDIUM (middle table).
Notice that we got 5 phone calls from organic and 3 calls from pay per click (cpc). All those phone calls rang at the same place - the Vethubs office. However, we were able to know the source of each phone call by using multiple tracking phone numbers. Now it's starting to make sense... I hope. The leads physically dialed different numbers depending on how they got to our website - but all calls rang at the same place...
How does the website know which phone number to show?
So you understand that you need multiple phone numbers to track these marketing channels. But how are they displayed? This is really the magic part. Our white label seo program phone tracking software inspects the traffic as it enters your website via a small piece of javascript. This script, very similar to that used by Google Analytics, has rules that are defined for each tracking phone number that defines the source and behavior of that phone number. This rule configuration is also done via self-service in our white label phone tracking screens. See below:
Notice that in addition to defining the behavior of the phone number swaping, you can also order the tracking phone number from the phone company in the Semify Agency Portal.
This is another new feature we are rolling out this week because the demand for these numbers has been so high. Our previous version required 24 hours before the number was active. With our new release, the number is active instantly. We have also added features such as whisper, call recording disclaimer, numbers in Canada and the UK, 30-day cookies for remembering the traffic source over multiple visits and a bunch more.