Best Practices

Why You Need Call Tracking for a Full View of the Customer Journey

More and more interactions are shifting online, but for businesses with a longer sales cycle or have high dollar goods and services, phone calls are still an essential part of business. The source of these calls remained a huge blind spot for many marketers until the invention of call tracking. Read below for four reasons why you need call tracking to get a full view of the customer journey.

Get Granular Insights on Paid Media Efforts

Many people understand the benefits of using call tracking numbers on your website to understand how many people called from desktop, as opposed to click to call tracking, which as a general rule of thumb, will only capture mobile phone calls. But what you may not realize is that call tracking software can capture more than just the number of calls you get. 

A call tracking software can capture your full URL, including UTM codes. Which means if you’ve put the name of your ad creative or copy in the utm_content field and the keyword in the utm_term field, you can now tell not only which campaigns drove the highest number of calls, but you can also drill down into which specific ads resonated most with your users. Feel free to get creative with your UTM fields for more granular insights on targeting options, ad placements, and ad size (remember that competitors can see your UTM codes, though). The best part a call tracking software that uses UTMs though? They’re platform agnostic, so even if you’re not using Google Analytics, you don’t have to miss out on insights.

Track All Calls from Your Google Listing (Google Business Profile)

Your website isn’t the only place online where people can find your phone number. If you have local businesses, you likely have local online listings, such as with Yelp, Facebook, and especially Google Business Profiles (FKA Google My Business). With its prominence on the search engine results page, your Google listing is the online listing likely to get the most traffic, but did you know their call reporting only reports on mobile calls? Enter your static call tracking number. 

By accurately capturing the amount of calls you receive from your Google listings, you can help better understand the ROI of your online profiles. From there, you may decide it’s worth it to engage with a listing management partner to ensure your listing is always up to date and can take advantage of the latest feature releases. Or you may decide that you need to venture into paid search for your local listings.

Take Credit for Offline Conversions

Understanding how traditional mediums impact your bottom line is just as important as understanding how digital mediums impact your bottom line. If you’re running any form of direct mail, billboard advertising (OOH), or even partnering with another company for a sponsorship opportunity, I highly recommend you invest in call tracking.  

Without call tracking, you are forced to rely on modeling and third-party attribution tools to help you understand what impact your offline advertising might have had. Instead, take a small part of that budget so you understand definitively what impact you had. Now, here I want to address an elephant in the room – this idea isn’t new, but not many people do it because they assume there is a high cost associated with call tracking. I’m personally partnered with Call Rail, which has plans starting at $45 for 250 minutes. With such a low cost to entry, this is a no-brainer on how to measure the effectiveness of your traditional mediums. 

Understand the Full Impact of A/B Testing

Call tracking with A/B testing isn’t new, but most times it’s not used to its fullest extent. If you’re thinking that you should only use call tracking when you’re testing out the placement or color of a phone number, think again. I recommend you implement call tracking whenever you’re testing out any on page element and get the full story of user interactions on the page. 

For example, when you changed the color of your button from red to blue, did you really lose any leads, or were people just more inclined to call? When they called, did they convert at a higher percentage? When you implement call tracking with all your A/B tests, you can answer these questions and so many more. 

Summary

Getting a holistic view of the customer journey requires you to collect data points about online and offline behavior of potential customers. A call tracking software gives never before seen insight into the ROI of your traditional and digital advertising. By providing insights on how to better allocate your media spend and optimize your creative assets, call tracking software is the one tool in your toolbox that will pay for itself. I’ve used Call Rail for over five years now, and I’m happy to now be a Call Rail affiliate. To sign up for a trial, visit their website here. Please note, by clicking this link, I may get a small commission at no cost to you.

How Do I Name My Event Tracking?

Now that you know what event tracking is and what you should and shouldn’t be tracking, the next step is to start setting up naming conventions for your event tracking. Each event consists of three to four attributes – a category, an action, a label, and sometimes a value. Selecting the right naming conventions is important for both organization and setting up any event-based goals in Google Analytics, so I’ve outlined pointers for each of the three mandatory attributes and a friendly word of caution. 

Naming Your Event Category 

A category should be a broad attribute, able to cover a number of different interactions. For example, if on your website you’re tracking email clicks, phone calls, and a form submission, a good category might be “Contact.” Another example is if on your website you’re tracking two different sales inquiry forms, a general contact form and a support form, a good category might be “Form.” 

You’ll see that in both of these examples, each of these categories was able to be applied to three or more types of interactions. While there isn’t a hard and fast rule for the number of interactions that need to fit under your category, aim for both scalability and accuracy. For example, If you know you’re going to have a number of people watching a video on your website, the best category may be simply “Video” 

Naming Your Event Action 

The next attribute you’ll need to assign to your event is an action. Many people default to the standard action of “click,” but I want to remind you that there are more actions to complete on your website than just a click. Someone can buy, call, email, download, watch a video, fail to submit a form, succeed in submitting a form, get directions, click a CTA, click an external link, and more! While there’s more wiggle room to be specific here, my main takeaway is to make sure the name you give your action accurately describes the action the user is performing. 

Naming Your Event Label 

Your label is going to be your most specific attribute. You can specify which video someone watched, which CTA they clicked on, who they emailed, which form they submitted and more. It’s important to get very specific here, because without your specificity, your event tracking may be all for naught.

Depending on the skill of the developer implementing your event tracking (or your own skills with Google Tag Manager), your event label can even contain a user’s response within the checkboxes and radio buttons on your website forms. This can serve especially helpful when you’re looking to retarget users who have filled out a form. 

Don’t Collect Personal Identifiable Information (Collecting PII) 

I mentioned this briefly in my post about what not to track with event tracking, but it’s important to reiterate that when creating your event category, action, and label, you should make sure you don’t store information from any form fields that could hold any personally identifiable information (PII).

First and foremost, collecting PII is against Google’s terms of service, and as a result Google could wipe out all the data in your Google Analytics account. Secondly (although much less important), there are so many other databases, such as marketing automation programs and CRMs that can hold this information in a much more useful way. 

Summary 

Naming your event tracking correctly is key to having useful, actionable data. By ensuring you have a broad enough category, an accurate action, and a specific label, all while avoiding PII, you can help set up your business for scalable data collection. 

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What Should I Track In Google Analytics Event Tracking: Part 2

 

When setting up event tracking, the first thing you’ll need to decide is what you’re tracking on your website. You may be compelled to track every button click on your website, however, as I’ve discussed previously, collecting data for data’s sake is a bad move. In this two-part blog, I’m going to write about some key events to track that help move your business goals forward, such as CTAs and ways people are contacting you. 

Tracking Specific CTAs on Your Website 

While Google Analytics will tell you how a user moves between pages on your website, it is unable to distinguish which button a user clicked to get to the next page. That is, you won’t be able to get this information from Google Analytics without event tracking. That means if you ever want to be able to determine the most effective CTA on any given page, it’s best to add event tracking to the clicks on these buttons. 

Tracking Carousel Advances on Your Website 

Despite the hundreds of studies saying no one looks at the second slide on the carousel on your website, people still love carousels. As Google makes page speed a more important factor, tracking the clicks carousel CTAs is going to be an important tool in your arsenal. Only then will you have the data to show whether or not people are advancing through your carousel.

Tracking Buttons You Want to A/B Test 

If you’re using Google Optimize to A/B test CTAs on your website, by definition the success or failure of your test would be whether or not someone clicks on the CTA. Google understands this and makes this kind of A/B testing possible through event tracking. By adding event tracking to the button click of that CTA, you can then tell Google “Hey, this button has been clicked!” Google will in return tell you which variation of the button received more clicks (was more successful).

Tracking External Links on Your Website 

Tracking external links on your website is something I highly recommend, especially if an external link click on is the desired action on a page. For example, a desired action for a bank might be using a login button that goes to a third-party website. Another example is a music artist who might want you to click on a “Get Tickets” link. 

Without implementing external link event tracking, you won’t be able to tie your specific online marketing activities, such as social posting, SEO, or digital ads, to ticket-buying intentions and logins. 

Other external links that would be useful to track are:

  • Clicks off to any third-party careers page
  • Links to your social pages
  • Any resources you mention in your blogs
  • Social sharing buttons 

Tracking PDF Downloads on Your Website 

PDFs are not considered external links because when you click on a PDF the domain name almost always stays the same. However, since PDFs are not rendered as a web page, you cannot add Google Analytics tracking to PDFs. As a result, I recommend event tracking any clicks to a link ending in .pdf to give you a better idea of who is looking at PDFs from your website. 

Summary 

Deciding what to track on your website can be an overwhelming task. Staying focused on business goals and understanding how people are using your website can lead you in the right direction. Missed the first part of this blog? Check out What Should I Track In Google Analytics Event Tracking Part 1. 

 

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What Should I Track with Google Analytics Event Tracking: Part 1

When setting up event tracking, the first thing you’ll need to decide is what you’re tracking on your website. You may be compelled to track every button click on your website, however as I’ve discussed previously, collecting data for data’s sake is a bad move. In this two-part blog, I’m going to write about some key events to track that help move your business goals forward, such as CTA (call to action) clicks and form submissions.

Tracking Form Submissions on Your Website 

There are a couple of different ways to track form submissions on your website. The most popular way to track these submissions is by having the form submission result in a thank you page. Sometimes, however, a thank you page can be visited without a user ever submitting his or her information. As a result, you may want to track form submissions via event tracking. 

You can take your form submission event tracking to the next level by tracking the fields people try and skip when submitting a form. Is everyone from your Facebook campaign willing to fill out the form, but only if they don’t have to give a last name? Do people give up on trying to contact you after the fourth form field? Event tracking can tell you all of that! 

Side note: If you’re still waffling about how to best track form submissions, visit my post about destination based goals vs. event-based goals. 

Tracking (Mobile) Calls on Your Website 

Tracking all phone calls generated from a website without purchasing call tracking software or using a dedicated website phone number is impossible. Tracking calls on mobile, however, is a completely different (and much easier) story. Any time someone “clicks to call” your business from your website, you can record it as an event in Google Analytics. Even better, with the shift to mobile, these click to call events are increasing by the minute and the amount of data you’re missing out on is decreasing.  

Side note: With desktop calling programs, such as Skype, it is technically possible to call from your desktop. It’s just very unlikely.  

Tracking Email Clicks on Your Website 

Sometimes people want to contact you outside of a form submission or a phone call. This is where it’s helpful to track clicks on your email links. Although those email clicks may not necessarily translate into email sends, it’s helpful to know all the different ways people are trying to contact you. Additionally, you may find it useful to have an email that is solely featured on the website, that way if someone emails you even without clicking, you are able to attribute the source of that email more accurately. 

Summary 

Deciding what to track on your website can be an overwhelming task, but staying focused on business goals and understanding how people are using your website can lead you in the right direction. Stay tuned for part two of things you should event track coming up next week! 

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What Not to Track with Google Analytics Event Tracking 

 

When setting up event tracking, the first thing you’ll need to decide is what you’re tracking on your website. I’ve dedicated two whole blog posts to this, so I won’t take the time to talk about them here. Instead I’ll start with what you shouldn’t track in Google Analytics. 

Don’t Track Every Button 

You may be compelled to track every button click on your website. After all, it’s free data. I don’t recommend doing this for a number of reasons. Mainly, it’s not wise to collect data for data’s sake. Collecting data for data’s sake makes it harder to drill down into the actual dimensions you need. It’s like going shoe shopping and having mens shoes mixed in with womens shoes when you’re looking for a simple black high heel. I’m frustrated just thinking about it. 

Don’t Use Google Analytics As a Substitute for UX Programs 

If you’re tracking all non-pageview interactions, you might be trying to shoehorn Google Analytics into something it’s not, like a UX analysis tool. Google Analytics is great at tracking many things, but user behavior and user flow within forms and between pages is not one of them. Sure, there are reports called behavior flow and event flow, but neither of them is worth their weight in salt. Take the time to look for free UX tools like Hotjar before you muddy up your Google Analytics data. 

The one caveat I will add is that it is okay to add event tracking to certain features on your website to see whether or not they’re actually used. Great examples of this include a carousel, an accordion, or even a CTA that’s caused great debate in the office. In this case, you’re not trying to track a user journey, every item in the navigation or every button on a page. Instead, you’re strategically trying to collect data. For example, out of the 100 users who landed on your website this past month, only .2% of them clicked on the questionable CTA in the top right corner. 

Don’t Go Over 10 Million Hits 

Even though you think the data you’re collecting with Google Analytics event tracking is free, if you collect enough data you may be violating Google Analytics’ service level agreement (SLA). When you joined Google Analytics, you agreed to an SLA limiting you to 10 million hits per month per property. A hit is defined as “an interaction that results in data being sent to Analytics”  where a hit could include “page tracking hits, event tracking hits, and e-commerce hits.” 

If you do go over the 10 million hits, you’ve got two things to worry about. First, you’ll experience an increase in the amount of sampling of your data, meaning less accuracy for you to make decisions from. Secondly, if Google catches you, they might force you to upgrade to Google Analytics 360, which runs $150,000 per year.

Don’t Track Personally Identifiable Information

As tempting as it may be to record the names of people submitting a form, you should probably stop, collaborate and listen. Storing personally identifiable information (PII), such as names, phone numbers, or street addresses in Google Analytics is strictly forbidden. 

Summary 

Knowing what not to track in Google Analytics is just as important as what to track in Google Analytics. It leads to clean data for better decisions. View my other blogs for what you should track in Google Analytics (part one and part two) and how to name your event tracking. 

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Best Practices for UTM Coding: Part 2 

 

UTM coding can quickly go awry if you don’t follow best practices. Consistency and attention to detail can be the difference between an easily analyzed set of data and one that provides no insight at all. Read part 2 on UTM best practices and the different rules to make sure your extra work results in better data. 

Have Unique Ad Content When UTM Coding 

If you’re going to use ad content to distinguish posts (read my post about ad content and UTM coding here), make sure your ad content is unique on each post. If your ad content is not unique, you will be unable to distinguish between posts, and all your time spent UTM coding will be lost. If you have two posts on the same day on two different channels, you’re in the clear because the source and medium will be your distinguishing factor. 

Don’t Use UTM Coding on PPC 

UTM coding is super cool, but it’s also pretty limited in the information it passes along. The links automatically generated by AdWords (auto-tagging) on the other hand are extremely complex. When auto-tagging is enabled, Google AdWords passes along a parameter called a gclid (short for Google Click ID). The gclid stores source, medium, campaign, ad group, keyword, and ad creative, just like UTM coding, but it does it automatically.  

Additionally (and more importantly), the gclid contains:

  • query match type
  • hour of day
  • keyword positions
  • display targeting
  • video campaign data
  • shopping campaign data
  • Ad Group
  • AdWords final url
  • ad format (text, display, video)
  • ad distribution network (Google search)
  • placement domain (the domain on the content network where your ads were displayed)
  • AdWords Customer ID

The gclid also contains potentially more top-secret information that Google hasn’t told us. (Note: Google changes their mind often. For a complete up to date list, click here: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1733663?hl=en).

Pay Attention to Your Trailing Slash 

A trailing slash or a lack of a trailing slash on your initial website url can break your UTM coding. Unfortunately, there’s no absolute rule of whether or not you should use a trailing slash. Trailing slash rules are dictated by your server configuration and server configuration is different for every website. What may seem like a trailing slash to you may actually be something completely different from a development perspective.  

My advice to you is that unless you speak fluent server, it’s best to test out your UTM codes for different page types on both mobile and desktop before you post it on the World Wide Web. 

Summary 

In the words of Monica from Friends “Rules are good! Rules help control the fun!” You can say the same for UTM coding. By following the above UTM best practices, you can be sure that your dive into data is a party for more ROI, not a funeral for your analytics. If you haven’t already, be sure to check out Best Practices for UTM Coding Part 1 here or learn more about why you still need UTM coding even when you have Facebook Insights and email reporting.

 

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Best Practices for UTM Coding: Part 1

 

UTM coding can very quickly go awry if you don’t follow best practices. Consistency and attention to detail can be the difference between an easily analyzed set of data and one that provides no insight at all. If you’ve already read my post about UTM coding 101, read below to learn about the different rules to make sure your extra work results in better data. 

Keep UTM Coding Consistent 

Consistency is something that can be easily missed when you’re sharing your UTM coding duties with others. When choosing your source, medium, campaign, and ad content, make sure you use the same pattern and nomenclature. For example, you’ll need to decide whether you name your source facebook or fb and stick with it. You may find it helpful to keep a Google Doc that you share with your coworkers to remind all of you the naming conventions you decided on.  

Plan for growth with your UTM Codes 

When naming your campaigns, think about possible future campaigns and how to categorize them. For example, your campaign name shouldn’t be fall-sweaters if you plan on selling lawn mowers in the future. A more applicable campaign name might fall-clothing or just fall-promotions. 

Don’t use profanity in Your UTM Codes 

Although this may seem like an obvious recommendation, remember – users can see your UTM coding when they look at the address bar in their browser. Don’t use profanity or other inappropriate wording unless you have a strong desire to be called in by your human resources department. 

Only Use Lowercase in Your UTM Codes 

The suggestion to only use lowercase in your UTM codes comes from a “better safe than sorry” place. Having both uppercase and lowercase ad content increases your chances of inconsistency. This inconsistentcy can split up your data and can cause you miss larger patterns in your data.

Even more important though, using uppercase can throw off the source and medium for Google and make it unable to be categorized into a specific channel (for more on sources and mediums, see my blog article here).

Don’t Use Special Characters in Your UTM Codes 

This is another “better safe than sorry” recommendation. Spaces and special characters in your UTM code increase your chance of breaking the URL. This is a factor that can vary based on browser and the server configuration you currently have on your website.  If you’re still insistent that your words be broken up somehow, I would recommend using dashes instead of spaces to separate out words. 

Always Use Source and Medium in Your UTM Code 

Your UTM code won’t work without a source and medium. While you may think you’re saving time by not including this information in your UTM code, at the end of the day the joke’s on you – none of the information you typed into that UTM code will make it to Google Analytics. 

Summary 

In the words of Monica from Friends “Rules are good! Rules help control the fun!” The same can be said for UTM coding. By following the rules above, such as always using lowercase and never using profanity, you can be sure that your dive into data is a party for more ROI, not a funeral for your analytics. Be sure to check out Best Practices for UTM Coding Part 2 and where you can use UTM coding.

 

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Where to Use UTM Coding 

 

In our blog about UTM Coding 101, we went over the basics of UTM coding, specifically source, medium, ad content, and campaign. Now that you’re familiarized with the basics though, it’s important to know where you should use them. 

Use UTM Coding for Offline Advertising 

UTM Coding can be great at tracking offline marketing efforts that often times don’t have a direct ROI. For example, if you have a print ad or a billboard, there will be almost no way to track your ROI without a UTM coded vanity URL. 

A vanity URL is a unique web address that is branded for marketing purposes (example: funinthesun.com would be a vanity url that you would want to use instead of your regular url gregsbeachwear.com). A vanity URL is more beneficial than a long url since people are less likely to type in all of the url (gregsbeachwear.com/billboard-promo). 

When we assign the vanity URL for our offline marketing effort, we can then use a UTM code when we redirect it to the main site: (ex: gregsbeachwear.com/?utm_source=billboard&utm_medium=offline).  

Use UTM Coding for Email Content 

Email marketing programs have come a long way. In some cases they can even attribute view through conversion (i.e. someone who viewed an email, didn’t click on it, but then later made a purchase on your website). The downfall of almost all email marketing programs, however, is that they’re recorded in Google Analytics as direct traffic (see my blog about sources and mediums if you’re unfamiliar with this term). 

Right now you probably don’t believe me that you’re getting almost no credit for your emails in Google Analytics, but luckily there’s a way to test this out. By using the real time feature in Google Analytics, click on a link in one of your emails and find out what Google deems the source and medium to be. 

Once you’ve decided that you do want to UTM code your email links, take this opportunity to begin testing out different creative, calls to action, and email formats to see which versions are driving visits to your website. 

Use UTM Coding for Social Post and Social Buttons 

While Google is normally pretty good about attributing the right source and medium for your social posts, if you’re featuring posts that go to the same page multiple time or you’ve got special book buttons like the one you see below, it may be useful to use UTM coding. 

If you want to take your UTM coding a step further, you can test out targeting different audiences, posting at different times of the day (especially with platforms like twitter), or different creative (especially with such visually-centric mediums such as Pinterest). 

Use UTM Coding for QA 

In an ideal world, we’d have a view in our Google Analytics account just for our own IP address. But in the event where we don’t have permission to filter out our own IP address, or if our IP addresses are anonymized to comply with GDPR, a UTM code may be your best bet for QA (Quality Assurance). 

A test UTM code can be as simple as example.com/?utm_source=test&utm_medium=test

Lastly, this test UTM code may be helpful to QA your IP exclusion filters in Google Analytics. By asking the organization you’re filtering out to click on your test UTM code, you can see whether or not their traffic came through. 

Summary 

UTM Coding can be used anywhere and everywhere – whether you’re doing quality assurance on your website or tracking marketing initiatives across digital and traditional channels. Each opportunity to track is an opportunity to learn more about your audience and can increase ROI if done properly. Check out my other blog posts about UTM coding best practices with UTM coding part 1 and UTM coding part 2 or dive into why you still need UTM coding even though you have Facebook Insights and email report.

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