Tracking leads that contact a sales department by filling out a web form or sending an email is easy. Google and a host of others provide free web site analytic tools that report information about web site visitors, how they found your site and whether or not they converted (i.e. filled out a web form to contact your company.) Most businesses that generate leads through online advertising or SEO (search engine optimization) use this information to calculate the cost per click, cost per conversion/lead, and ultimately the cost per customer acquisition. Important information, right?
The problem with tools like Google Analytics is they don’t provide statistics about site visitors that contact your company via the phone. Often a company’s best leads call so without this data, marketers don’t know the true cost of an online campaign, where their best leads come from, and the overall effectiveness of their efforts. To address this issue, Plum developed an IVR application that tracks data from leads that call. Each time a visitor comes to our site a unique 800 number is displayed. These unique numbers correlate with a site visitor’s search information collected from Google (and the other search engines). When someone calls our sales department, information about the caller’s search path is posted to Salesforce. Before the call is connected, our team also receives an instant message with the caller’s search term, adword, campaign and/or referring URL so they can immediately address questions related to a visitor’s interest in a specific Plum product. This data helps provide a complete picture of which ads perform best, which sites send us the most traffic, and the true cost of our online marketing campaigns.
We will post the algorithm and pseudocode for this application shortly so anyone with access to a VoiceXML platform can implement this application.
