How to track calls from your web site

Measuring contacts from your web site is very important for any business. The easiest one is to measure how may requests you get via a simple contact form . You can also count how many visitors clicked your email address, Skype or chat button. Measuring incoming calls are little bit harder but very crucial to understand the whole effect of your online presence and any marketing activity. And yes, you have couple of options how to track calls from your web site. You can simply have one phone number, reserved and showed only at your site (or a marketing campaign). In this case you know that any incoming call comes from your web site or certain campaign. With eStara's call tracking solution you can also:

• measure number of calls (hourly, daily, weekly, monthly)
• forward calls to multiple destinations
• record calls (check your local privacy law)
• save caller details such as phone number and name (check your local privacy law), geographical location and call duration

eStara has also two other quite handy solutions called click to call and click to chat. You can actually put a simple "talk to us" button to your web site as many visitors and potential customers want to call rather than fill forms or write emails. Depending on situation you can use "call us free" or pay per call strategy or something between, like Amazon does. And if you want to take this deeper, here are my KPIs (key performance indicators) for call tracking:

• call conversion rate, number of incoming calls divided by total number of web site visitors
• call click through rate (CTR), number of actual calls divided by number of "call us" button clicks or vice versa, call abandonment rate
• average time of call, especially if you get revenue from calls (pay per minute)
• wrong number rate, number of falls calls divided by total number of calls
• total revenue from calls, in case of pay per call or lead generation for off line sales
• cost per call, almost same as more common one, cost per click (CPC)
• return on investment (ROI) for campaigns aiming to incoming calls (and revenue)
  

You can link this click to call experience (or web site user exprience in general as well) to customer satisfaction survey. i Perceptions and Avinas Kaushik just presented a free tool for this called 4Q. Do you have your own experiences for call tracking? I would like to hear your comments and feedback.