ROI beyond the web: tracking keyword campaigns out to the call center

Assigning a unique toll-free number to appear on a web site to searchers who’ve come to the site through a particular keyword search is one way to track the value in other channels of a web-based marketing campaign. But when an online marketer wants to track tens of thousands of keywords, does tracking web search through to the call center require an unwieldy tens of thousands of unique phone numbers to match them? That’s an issue tackled by ClickPath, a web analytics provider whose system uses an algorithm to help shrink what might otherwise be the huge number of unique toll-free numbers needed to link a big keyword campaign to the call center into a smaller, more easily managed rotating pool.

“We can connect the call back to the keyword with a small pool of telephone numbers,” says Ted Carpenter, vice president of ClickPath, a unit of Who`s Calling Inc., a provider of telephonic sales lead management technology.

The hosted service does so by measuring the popularity of keywords in terms of how quickly and how often a keyword brings visitors to a site. Typically, says Carpenter, a small number of keywords in a large campaign will drive a very high percentage of the campaign’s traffic to the site. A larger number individually drive lower volume, but in the aggregate, account for substantial traffic.

As the analytics algorithm, with experience, begins to understand keyword popularity by measuring the velocity of traffic the different terms bring in, it starts to dynamically generate telephone numbers from the pool for the most popular ones, and it inserts them into the web page on the site so they are visible to the users who came to that site through that keyword. Less popular keywords, when they actually do get a click and bring a searcher to the site, receive a number at that time from a rotating pool of phone numbers. After a keyword doesn`t get searched at all for a set amount of time, the phone number generated for it drops back into the pool for reuse.

Carpenter says that because users who come to the site through a paid search campaign and then contact the call center do so within the context of a unique toll free number, ClickPath can integrate that information back into its web systems and match up those two interactions. “Then the web analytics portion of the product lets the site operator see all the calls that were made, and all the information surrounding those calls, with their online conversions,” he says.

ClickPath has yet to share any retailer’s experience with the system, which is a relatively recent launch. A b2b client, payments processing equipment seller Merchant Warehouse, has been using it since January to track sales in its call center from people using the phone numbers dynamically generated through its online campaigns. Within the first week, Merchant Warehouse saw which keywords were performing and cut spending on underperforming terms, reallocating the funds to campaigns that were generating calls. By consistently identifying and spending on the keywords with the highest value and the lowest cost, the company cut its keyword costs by 75% over six months, according to Carpenter.