Industries selling complex products such as banking and insurance rely heavily on sales being made over the phone. Products are very customizable and it’s characteristics and price depend on many factors so they are hard to distill into simple online forms.
Call traffic, however, is hard to link up with the behaviour of a user on the website. The reason being that when the user picks up the phone they break they can’t transmit their tracking ID so we can match up their phone sales to their behaviour. This makes our conversion data incomplete and it cripples the ability to make good decision regarding our advertising efforts.
This article will show how to push eCommerce data for sales made by callers to Google Analytics. Each sale made on the phone will be pushed to the correct website user to have complete data for decision making.
Connecting Website Users With Phone Calls Using CallRail
CallRail is a service that swaps the phone numbers on our website with unique numbers for each user. Their system can then depending on the number called match that up to a specific user and continue the data flow even after the phone is picked up.
CallRail setup is pretty straightforward. You set up your account, configure number swapping, and just add a simple script that swaps the actual code on your site. Install is quick and painless. This is a prerequisite for the actual sale tracking in the next step.
Sending Phone Sales to Analytics
Pushing sales to Google Analytics can be done from within your own sales software by utilizing their Measurement Protocol. Each time a sale is made in your system it should be pushed into Analytics along with the Google Client ID (GCID) or the Google Ads Click ID (GCLID). The mentioned IDs link the users behaviour on the site with the sale.
However, the question is how to get the GCID or GCLID to your system in the first place if the customer just called in. To do that we will have to use the Webhook integration for CallRail.
CallRail Webhook integration offers the ability to send user data after each call has been made. The payload they send will look something like this:
{
"datetime": "2013-02-05 16:14:43",
"trackingnum": "+14047773734",
"callernum": "+17451187568",
"destinationnum": "4041234567",
"callsource": "disabled",
"callername": "Olivia Rodriguez",
"keywords": "",
"referrer": "",
"referrermedium": "",
"landingpage": "",
"recording": "https://app.callrail.com/calls/247716205/recording/1b6d7d5f0c54f2e2ed4b",
"answered": true,
"duration": "157",
"first_call": true
}
This does not give us the identifier by default but after you also enable the Google Analytics CallRail integration they will get sent along with all the info above. If you are using any other unsupported analytics systems you can even push custom cookies with the Cookie integration.
Now all that remains is to set up an endpoint in your sales system which will get the info after each call and store the relevant identifier on the user record. Each time that users makes a sale it should be pushed to Analytics using Measurement Protocol.
After that is complete you are successfully tracking when your website users make a sale on the phone!