When Your Web Visitors Call: Using Dynamic Telephone Number Insertion

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In previous articles about search engine marketing and website analytics, I have written about the importance of tracking leads from a website all the way through the buying cycle in order to determine which of your online campaigns are performing at optimal levels and which could use some tweaking.

A new technology, Dynamic Telephone Number Insertion (DTNI) has arrived, with the ability to track website leads based upon your incoming sales calls. With a modern website analytics platform (i.e. Google Analytics, Omniture, etc.), it is currently fairly simple to track your closed sales back to their point of origin, whether from organic search, banner ads, social networking, pay per click, or other online marketing initiatives. Unfortunately, traditional analytics platforms are limited to reporting on leads that actually take a physical point of action on your website, and cannot track telephone leads like DTNI can. As we all know, prospects sometimes prefer to pick up the phone and talk to someone at your company - and this propensity generally increases in proportion to the price point of your product or service. When you run traditional analytics programs without utilizing Dynamic Telephone Number Insertion, as soon as a prospect on your website decides to pick up the phone and call your company, the source of that high quality or low quality lead falls off the grid.

That is why it is an important part of your search engine marketing campaign to implement a website analytics technology like Dynamic Telephone Number Insertion to your site.

The Basics of Dynamic Telephone Number Insertion

Dynamic Telephone Number Insertion may sound fancy, but in practice it is actually a fairly simple concept. The DTNI website analytics system creates a placeholder where your phone number would normally appear across your website (generally located in or near the masthead of each page). When visitors come to your site, the source of that traffic is noted, and a different phone number appears for each different entry channel you are tracking, making it ideal to gauge the amount (and end result) of phone calls generated from your different online marketing campaigns.

For example, say you focus your online marketing efforts on organic search engine optimization, banner ads, and pay-per click marketing. Visitors to your site who came from organic search would see one phone number when they arrived, visitors who came from pay-per-click would see another, and visitors from banner ads would see still another – and your DTNI website analytics program will track the source of each of these leads.

Dynamic Telephone Number Insertion is a very simple configuration, and with DTNI, there are no limits to the number of channels you can track. Theoretically, you could have a different telephone number show up on your website for every individual keyphrase that you are targeting organically; one for each pay-per-click phrase, one for each different link pointing to your site, etc. Obviously, granularity is not an issue with Dynamic Telephone Number Insertion (although the price for thousands of tracking numbers might be).

Since the DTNI systems offered today are primarily cookie-based, there is latency built in to this type of website analytics technology. In other words, if somebody found your website through a PPC ad one day and bookmarked your site only to return to it days later, they would still see the designated PPC number. In this manner, Dynamic Telephone Number Insertion allows a latent lead to be (properly) attributed to your pay-per-click search engine marketing efforts and not to an unknown channel.

Once you have decided which traffic sources you want to track, you will have to collect all of the DTNI information on a regular basis to analyze the phone call volume, and subsequent performance for each of your sources. This involves looking at the phone calls for each channel and matching up the data with the status of the prospects (closed, dead, still active, etc.). Using DTNI as part of your ongoing website analytics can obviously take a little work, but the benefits are obvious.

Limitations of DNTI
As with all other website analytics systems, there are of course some limitations to Dynamic Telephone Number Insertion. Unless you decide to utilize thousands of phone numbers, your designated numbers with DTNI will track the traffic origins that you specify and will not allow you to track all the way down to the individual keyphrase level. In other words, you will be able to track a phone call from, for example, organic search, but you will not know exactly what keyphrase was typed by the caller. Also, much like any source in a search engine marketing campaign, it is often impossible to anticipate where all of the traffic to your website will come from with DTNI. Let’s say your site was noted in a popular online publication but you only knew this after the fact; with your website analytics program you would be able to attribute leads directly to this channel as the referrals are noted in real-time. With DTNI, you would have to set the tracking capability in place beforehand, which is not always possible. Also, there is no guarantee that the data from the Dynamic Telephone Number Insertion program you use to measure the efficacy of your online marketing campaigns will always be 100% accurate. For example, a person may write down a number they saw from your website when they found it via a particular source and give that number to someone else, who then calls. The second person would then be attributed by DTNI as coming in directly from one of your designated traffic sources. However, considering that there was probably website analytics tool in place to track phone call leads from your website prior to Dynamic Telephone Number Insertion, most people find these instances to be of trivial significance.

With any lead-based online marketing campaign, it is important to take baselines, track progress, and, most importantly, have the ability to evaluate the performance of each of your online marketing initiatives. Before DTNI became available, a huge piece of this puzzle was missing, but now, companies that are serious about their tracking the sources of all of their online leads can consider using Dynamic Telephone Number Insertion to round out their website analytics toolbox.

About the Author
Scott Buresh is the founder and CEO of Medium Blue, a search engine optimization company, which was awarded a prestigious American Marketing Association award in both 2008 and 2010. Buresh has been featured in respected publications such as Entrepreneur, Success, Direct Marketing News, Business to Business, Search Marketing Standard, Public Relations Tactics and the Atlanta Business Chronicle. His articles have appeared in numerous online publications, including ZDNet, WebProNews, MarketingProfs, DarwinMag, SiteProNews, ISEDB.com, and Search Engine Guide. He was also a contributor to How to Build Your Own Web Site with Little or No Money: The Complete Guide for Business and Personal Use (Brown, 2010), The Complete Guide to Google Advertising (Atlantic, 2008) and Building Your Business with Google for Dummies (Wiley, 2004). Medium Blue is an Atlanta search engine optimization company with local and national clients, including the Atlanta Humane Society, Afterburner, Inc. and DeKalb Medical.