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Proxy Websites and Call Tracking

Proxy sites are a method used to enable call tracking on a website. The original website is mirrored on a  proxy server and call tracking numbers are placed on the duplicate site

However there are some risks involved when using proxy websites, including when it comes to call tracking:

Not using call tracking on original website

If call tracking is not implemented on your primary website, you could be missing out on tracking cross channel calls. For example if the first call came in through paid search – which was tracked via a proxy site – and then a second call was made in via organic search where no call is tracking is implemented, this second call/interaction would be missed. This means this call – and any potential sales made – could not be attributed back to the original call.

SEO and SEM

To have the best impact for SEO, all organic and SEM traffic should be going to the same domain. This way the domain gets the SEO benefits from the traffic increases of SEM. By using a proxy site, these benefits are lost as traffic is pushed to a duplicate site.

 Duplicate Content

As a proxy site is often a mirror of the primary website, it can potentially create a duplicate content issue. If you must use a proxy site, it is important to ensure you set the page up correctly so it does not create duplicate content. This generally involves putting in no follow and no robot tags so the website is not crawled or indexed.

Customer Experience

Customer Experience or CX is becoming increasingly important for all websites. And making sure you provide a good customer experience and logical customer journey can be the difference between a call or web conversion and turning them into a customer or losing that potential customer.

By using a proxy site, you are potentially damaging the customer experience as it’s not maintaining a consistent customer journey. Even if the proxy site closely mirrors the primary website, it can still be slightly different, creating confusion for the customer. Sometimes a proxy site might also have additional text appended at the start of the URL which can cause confusion or create suspicion of the website being a phishing attack.

How Call Tracking Can Assist you instead of Proxy Sites

Often businesses will setup a proxy site for their SEM campaigns so that the proxy site will still display the same phone number and calls can be tracked through the proxy site. However Delacon’s call tracking solution provides a much better alternative.

By setting up call tracking to track SEM/PPC campaigns, you can ensure that customers who land on your site see unique phone numbers, allowing you to track how many calls your SEM campaigns are generating. By using dynamic numbers, we can even serve different phone numbers to two or more people on the website at the same time so we can be more accurate with the call tracking.

Call Extensions

You can even bypass the need for callers to go to your website altogether by using Delacon tracking numbers in your call extensions. This allows you to track calls made directly from SERP results.