We look at web analytic information all the time to measure a lot of things and certainly conversions and contacts are top of the list. As advertising dollars continue to shift from offline to online methods and as Pay-Per-Click word costs continue to soar a lot more emphasis is being placed on measuring the return on the Internet marketing dollar. Companies that rely upon online reporting methods alone to determine the value of their SEO, PPC, or Social Media efforts are probably only looking at 40% of the picture. The folks at ThomasNet (112 year old industrial sourcing kingpins) did an interesting study a couple of years ago. They ran a beta test of a 100 or so of their industrial B2B clients websites. Called Mirror Site Imaging, they generated carbon copies of the beta sites and placed them on a different server. The mirrored sites were invisible to the search engines so the only online traffic that could find its way there was from ThomasNet.com. They placed a tagged phone number into the header of the beta sites and even recorded the calls that went to the participating clients businesses. What they found was that just over 63% of the conversions took place offline! I bet 99.9% of B2B companies do not have an accurate way to track offline conversions to Internet marketing dollars. There has to be a top down dedication to doing so. It’s not an easy process and you cannot rely on the folks answering the phone to ask and track “how did you find out about us?”. I recall a few years back reviewing a list of tracked calls with one of my clients in Upstate NY that we had put onto a service from Kall8. The way it words is a virtual phone number is placed into the header of the website pages and when called it rolls to the clients existing phone number. Unless the caller is using a blocked or unlisted number online reports will show you who called you. Anyways, I am reviewing this list of calls from the first 21 days with my client and it wasn’t a huge list. Maybe 24 calls. He’s moving down the list when his finger stops and starts to laugh. He tells me that it’s a good thing we decided to track the phone calls to our Internet marketing efforts cause he just signed a 750K deal with a company on the call report. We never would have gotten credit for the sale without this visibility. Before I left that client asked me to come up with an increased scope of work. Two weeks later he doubled his contract with us.
I’ve been reading a lot about ClickPath and they seem to have also covered the bases pretty well with offline conversion tracking. Anyone have any experience with their product or others?
