One of our clients – Ifbyphone - just announced some new functionality that will make it a LOT easier for advertisers to track phone leads by advertising campaign and pull the data into Google Analytics. We're especially excited about what this means for Search Engine Marketing campaigns, although it can be used to track calls from any kind of advertising.

We've always been frustrated when our SEM campaign ROI has been underreported because we didn't have an easy way of telling what phone calls originated from Search. Even in those cases where we had a sense for how much call volume our Search campaigns were driving, we could never attribute the calls to the originating Campaign or Ad Group so we could adjust bids and spending to ensure we were getting the most out of the campaigns.

Some advertisers have developed a basic multiplier they apply to their web leads/sales to account for the lift from phone sales we all knew was happening even though we couldn't measure it. That's better than nothing, but not very precise or actionable.

Some more advanced advertisers have set up custom 800 numbers for various campaigns so they could get more granular call data. But in most cases they had to manually marry up the web data with the phone data, usually weeks or months after the fact. This enabled some better intelligence, but still fell short of having one system tracking everything in real time.

But with Ifbyphone's new system, now we can achieve the vision of having web and phone lead data reported in ONE system. And not just any system, but the very popular Google Analytics. See Thomas Howe's review of this new capability from Ifbyphone here: Simple and Brilliant.

More on how it works on the Ifbyphone blog here: Phone Mashup for Tracking Call Data in Googe Analytics.

More detailed information will be coming out shortly.

As with many things, it will take some good planning and upfront work in order to get the most out of this new capability. But the bottom line is that this solves a big problem for a lot of advertisers. If you drive a decent amount of call volume from your campaigns, you owe it to yourself to check out this new tool. It's an easy and low-cost way to make sure you're spending your advertising dollars more intelligently. Who can argue with that?

During her crazy adventure to Finland for the Persuasive Technology conference (more on that here), CLM’s Amy Greer met a fascinating gentleman from the UK named Richard Sedley. Richard works at a UK-based agency called cScape managing the Customer Engagement group. Amy introduced me to Richard when she returned and, in an attempt to brush up on my transoceanic diplomacy skills, we’ve been conversing ever since.

Recently, Richard graciously asked CLM to participate in the Customer Engagement Survey he runs in conjunction with E-Consultancy. Having seen the people who participated in the past surveys (like Andy Beal and Avinash K), we jumped at the chance. You can see the summary report from the previous surveys here.
So I’m putting out the call to all companies (including agencies) to take the survey. It only takes a few minutes. I found it to be an eye-opening experience.

Take the survey