Companies who do business in Canada now can connect with customers more closely.  Today Mongoose Metrics announced the release of local phone numbers for Canada’s top seven metropolitan markets including Calgary, Edmonton, Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Vancouver and Winnipeg.  Canadian marketers now have never-before-available options to place local phone numbers on their websites and demonstrate their commitment to the local communities where they do business.  Mongoose Metrics’ pool of local Canadian numbers enables businesses which depend on geographically-oriented phone calls to capture important web-to-phone conversion data with a local flavor.  “We believe in delivering products that our customers ask for,” says Bradley Reynolds, chief executive officer for Mongoose Metrics.  He adds, “And with the addition of local numbers for Canada, we’ve demonstrated our dedication to developing solutions which make sense for our clients.”

Today I want to touch on the URL postback feature and the benefits it offers to our customers.

The URL postback feature is a standard feature in both AccuTrack 1:1 and AccuTrack Session products. Our full integration with existing web analyticss means that there is no additional cost associated with exporting this to your analytics. If you are looking at how to correctly setup this feature, please visit the integration guide - Phone Call Tracking with Google Analytics.

This guide will show you how to correctly set up your Mongoose Metrics account to send tracking data to Google Analytics.

However, in this post I do not want to get too technical and would rather focus on how the URL postback feature works.

How it works:

Whenever a phone call is made on one of your tracking numbers, information about that call is stored on our system. If you are using the URL postback feature, information is passed to Google Anayltics whenever our server visits a designated webpage. This visit is then represented as a phone call in your reports and carries with it details about the call. This information could be length of phone call, phone number, caller location, keyword, etc.

Example:

A visitor types into a search engine “Red Cars” and clicks on your Google Adwords PPC ad. While on your website they decide to give your company a call for more information. After the phone call is made, our system will tie back the visitor session to the original call. Then our server makes a visit to a designated webpage of your choice with the information about the phone call tagged in the URL string. When you view your Google Analytics report you will see this call under the campaign section. From there you can to drill down and see that the caller typed in “Red Cars” to find your website.

How it can help you:

URL postback saves by posting phone call tracking reports  alongside the rest of your online data. This allows you quickly compare the phone call tracking to web data without the need to access two different systems.

SEO and SEM firms have found the URL postback feature helpful because it frees them from having to extract reports from our interface. Instead, clients can easily see their call data in Google Anayltics.

The URL postback feature is a great way to save your company’s valuable time. If you have any more questions, please feel free to give us a call.

 Mongoose Metrics’ AccuTrack Session product allows customers to view what web site the caller visited before he or she called into the client.  AccuTrack Session’s Last URL product feature is the key to this service. Marketers can literally see what lead customers to their site with this service. By tracking the last URL, marketers can gain understandings around their website conversion points or failures.

The Last URL  feature is accomplished through our AccuTrack Session keyword level phone call tracking product.  During AccuTrack Session setup, customers place a javascript code snippet on their campaign web pages. This allows Mongoose Metrics to chronicle each site visitor’s page visit.  We can then correlate the site visit to a phone call.  The correlated data will include the last URL the site visitor viewed just prior to placing the call.

We’re excited about the Last URL feature because we understand how online marketers positively develop with key insights and actionable metrics.

Jeff Tirey is Co-Founder of Mongoose Metrics and can be found @TireyTv

This is a followup to the web site posting we made last week  exploring the Twitter/Mongoose Metrics Phone Call Tracking integration through our API. We felt it would be helpful to touch upon some of the frequently asked questions in this blog post.

First, phone call tracking through Twitter has always been possible through Mongoose Metrics’ AccuTrack 1:1 service. You just need to tweet to a tracking number associated that that tracking number’s appropriate postback URL. You can do so with Google’s URL builder tool. This is helpful if you wish to include a tracking number on each tweet at a broad level.

With Twitter phone call tracking, our focus was on how AccuTrack Session can use our API to integrate with Twitter’s API  to construct unique DMs to all followers. Each of these DMs will include a unique phone tracking number. This is a mass auto DM method.  With Mongoose Metrics’ AccuTrack Session API there is an auto phone number provisioning method that allows you to select your follower and provision a new tracking numbe into the DM. Hence, constructing a DM and provisioning and publishing phone number can all be done in one step. Since AccuTrack Session charges only for the publishing of the phone number, a Twitter auto DM phone call tracking campaign could be launched at an affordable cost related to the size of your list.  Since each follower now as a unique tracking number each call will be published to their DM.

Before you consider phone call tracking your followers through Twitter’s DM think about waht your Twitter community would think of this advertising.  I must admit that I am not engaged enough in the Twitter community to understand its marketing potential. Your followed may consider these positings spam.  I suggest caution because there are many in the Twitter community who have well constructed arguments against mass DM methods.   Here is a great discussion I found that brings out the arguments on both sides of the issues.

I’m in the camp that believes that if you don’t like what you’re getting in your DMs you should unfollow.  However, I would be wary of conducting a phone call tracking campaign through mass DMing if your followers are not expecting such messages.  I think a far more sound approach would be to create a Twitter account where followers know ahead of time that there will be marketing DMs. There is currently now way to segment followers in Twitters and this seems like the best compromise.

Marketing DMs could come from a Twitter account such as “[mycompany]CallForDeals”. Think of a local restaurant where it is hard to get a table and  reservations free up at the last minute. Consider the travel industry where last minute promotions can entice customers. These are just two quick example, but  I’m sure there are many other inductries where phone call tracking through Twitter’s mass DM can proves helpful.

In the end it’s up to you and your Twitter community to find ways where this model might work. However, from a technical level, phone call tracking to Twitter DMs can easily be done through Mongoose Metrics’ AccuTrack Session API.

Jeff Tirey is a Co-Founder of Mongoose Metrics you can find him @TireyTv