How to use Google Analytics to track telephone leads: Part two

Posted 11 November 2009 09:35am by Nikki Rae with 9 comments

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This is the second part on a series of posts to document how you can track telephone calls in Google Analytics.

Sorry for the delay guys, but I’m back to tell you probably the most simple part of the Call Tracking process namely, setting up your Google Analytics profile to capture the call data.

You can present the data within Google Analytics as;

1. A Virtual Page View
2. A Traffic Source / Medium
3. An Event

This depends upon how you setup the tracking, which is something I will discuss this in the next post!.

But obviously, firstly you need to setup a Google Analytics profile to accommodate this information.

You can store all the Call Data in a current profile that contains other traffic sources, however we recommend opening a single unique profile as visits from the Call Tracking System in fact represent the number of phone calls made rather than the number of visits to the site.

Below is a diagram of how it will appear in your profile under ‘Visitors’:

So, if you were to store this information in your regular profiles alongside other online traffic data, you will be inflating the number of ‘visits’ to your site which will clearly skew your data.

Setup a new Google Analytics profile as normal and name it e.g. ‘Call Tracking’. You can use your existing domain so long as you are adding the CallTracker page to your site (CallTracker page to be explained in next post…sit tight!).

Take a record of the new Google Analytics Tracking Code that has been created for the new profile as you will need it later.

Now you need to know how to interpret the data once it starts to feed through. Dependent upon how you want to view your data, you can setup to track in three different ways.

1. Virtual Page View

If you choose to set your tracking to instantiate virtual page views, then you can look in the content category and find information similar to the diagram below.

2. Traffic Source / Medium

You can also track this data by using Google Analytic’s tagging parameters to define, Campaign Source, Campaign Medium, Term, Content, Name etc. (For help use, http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55578).

You can then view this information under Traffic Sources:

How we magically get this data into Google Analytics and use appended campaign parameters will be explained in the next post.

3. Event Tracking

If you prefer to view telephone calls as an event rather than a source of traffic, then this too can be enabled. View under Content / Event Tracking:

That's it for now. Hope you found it useful. Please feel free to comment!