Tracking Calls From Banner Advertisements

Tracking calls from banner advertisements and eDMs

Online banner advertising and eDMs can deliver significant traffic to websites. The use of engaging graphics in conjunction with snappy straplines and headings are often irresistible to users casually browsing websites. Similarly, edMs sent to your database can deliver significant leads and up sell opportunities to your business.

The challenge for business is to accurately measure success of each banner and eDM – it’s no longer enough to simply measure the click conversion. If you’re not also measuring calls – then you’re missing a key metric that plays a significant part in the banner ad or eDM’s success or failure.

Our developers recently devised a solution so that Delacon’s call tracking clients can track calls from banner ads and eDMs regardless of whether a referrer is managing the placement of the banner or not.

Tracking calls from Banner Advertisements

In order to track call data from banner advertisements you need to add the additional code below to the tracking template in AdWords:

{lpurl}?utm_plasource=banner

See example in below image:

Tracking Display Banners

To view banner ad call data, you can simply login to the Delacon portal and view the Call Log Report. Calls made from display ads will show in the search engine field as ‘Google’ and in the type field as ‘Paid Banner’.

If you would like to capture more specific data on which individual banners are delivering phone calls, the below UTM parameter will need to be added to the landing page URL.

?utm_plasource=banner

Simply change the ‘=banner’ prefix to name each specific banner i.e. utm_plasource=bannerabc, ?utm_plasource=bannerxyz etc.

Example

If the landing page URL is: www.mylandingpage.com/business/abn.html, then the URL with the additional tracking code will be www.mylandingpage.com/business/abn.html?utm_plasource=banner.

If you want to name the banner to identify it specifically among many banner advertisements, then the URL will look like:

www.mylandingpage.com/business/abn.html?utm_plasource=bannerabc

By adding this additional code, we are forcing the page to always display a call tracking number. Logically, the referrer will be the last page before the lead lands on the business landing page.

Tracking calls from EDM’s

The same principle holds true for the tracking of calls that were originally prompted by an email or eDM.

If you want to track the volume of calls that were originally sparked by an email then you should add the code ?utm_plasource=email to the landing page URL.

Therefore if the landing page URL is: www.mylandingpage.com/business/abn.html, then the URL with the additional tracking code for emails will be be www.mylandingpage.com/business/abn.html?utm_plasource=email.

FAQs

Do I need to use  ?utm_plasource=email? Can it be a different name?

You need to use the ‘?utm_plasource’ prefix however you can change the ‘email’ to something else, for example ‘eDM’ if you wish to or need to name it something else.

How will eDM leads be displayed in the call reports?

Any leads which come through from an eDM (with correctly tagged URLs) will show in the Search Engine field as ‘Referral’ and Type field  as ‘Email’.

Do I need to make any changes to the Delacon configuration to see this data?

No you do not need to make any changes to Delacon’s configuration.

When will the data start coming through?

Once the URLs are tagged correctly, the data should start coming through as soon as lead comes through from an eDM.

If you have any unique online sources that require tracking – and our developers can devise a creative solution to assist your business accurately monitor calls from your marketing campaigns.

Lyndon Barnett

Lyndon has always been fascinated by technology.