One of our customers spends a lot of money on paid search, but their visitors almost always use the telephone when it's time to spend the big bucks -- making it almost impossible to use web analytics.  ("What did you search on, sir?" asked the CSRs and the answer would be, "I don't know, I typed something into Google.")

So we decided to harness the power of WA cookies. We linked a very small, unimportant word in the footer of each page to a new success page - "Thank you for your telephone order." It doesn't look like a link, so that non-customers won't idly click on it. At the end of a telephone order, the CSRs ask the customer to please click on the unimportant word-- and suddenly, we have data. Referrer, keyword, customer location -- the whole nine yards. And when the customer is not on his computer while placing the telephone order, he is sent an email with the link in it. The email link has special code on it that will preserve the original cookie's information (assuming that the customer opens up the email on the same computer, in the same browser, before wiping his cookies....)

Robbin Steif

Comments

[Robbin Steif]

I wanted to be the first person to post a comment on the blog. But more importantly, I wanted to point out that once we actually got this up and running (tracking telephone orders) and motivated the customer service reps to ask, we are finally making good marketing decisions based on the data.

[Vijay]

Robin, Another couple of options for offline tracking to add:

1. Leaving a unique-code (discount code) on each of the ad and let the person redeem it for a small incentive which will motivate them to remember the unique-code. Then the marketer can tie up these unique-code with the ad or the keywords that is tied to.

2. Another good option is to make sure the users come back to the site and register after they purchase it from the retail store. Based on the product, not everybody comes back but a good percentage of them definitely come back if we show a valid reason.