How To Track Leads from Billboards and other Traditional Marketing Mediums

Lead tracking is essential to marketing strategy. It helps your business compare which advertisements, and on which mediums, generate the most customer interest. With this knowledge, you can make educated decisions about your next marketing investments.

Lead Tracking on the Internet

For businesses that advertise on the web, lead tracking is a piece of cake. Google Analytics, and other tracking solutions, will tell you from which referring site a user came, and even what the user did on your site... including make a transaction. With Google Analytics, you can easily compare the success of a pay-per-click campaign versus a paid advertisement on a website.

But, businesses who wish to track marketing in print or billboard have to be a bit more creative. One great method to track consumer interest from a traditional marketing campaign is to create a landing page on a subdomain of your website, dedicated to consumers who have seen your traditional advertisement.

To accomplish this, the landing page should be excluded from Google Search results (In the robots.txt file, here's how.). Then, you reference the dedicated landing page in your advertisement. As an example, if you're a window installment company named Jeb's Windows, you might run a billboard ad "Visit JebsWindows.com/tenpercent" for a 10% off discount!" on the billboard. Then, via Google Analytics on the landing pages, you can track the traffic to the landing page, indicating how many people favorably responded to your advertisement.

Lead Tracking from Traditional Marketing Mediums

But, the landing page method is only good for businesses who have invested in a website. What if your business simply has little use for a website? Perhaps your customers aren't web savvy; or, maybe you have a super sales team, and you would rather have customers call! In that case, OnSIP comes in handy.

Similar to the landing page idea, OnSIP customers can provision a phone number for each marketing campaign for only $7 (setup) and $2 a month thereafter. Let's say you'd like to test a newspaper ad versus a billboard ad. Here is how you'd go about it:

1. In the OnSIP Admin view, click Buy a Phone number
2. Follow the instructions to create 2 new phone numbers: 1 for newspaper, 1 for billboard.
3. In the Admin view, click to manage phone numbers.
4. Click to manage each phone number: Set the destination as you please - to your auto attendant, ACD queue, etc. You may even make a note about each "Billboard" and "Newspaper."
5. Reference each phone number in their respective marketing campaigns. As people call from the ads, the numbers will ring your desired destinations (e.g, your main auto attendant) as specified.
6. As your marketing campaign runs, track the calls to each phone number in the Reports view: Click download CSV, open the CSV in excel, and filter the data for the two assigned numbers.

Setting this up is a matter of minutes (as opposed to the hours you could wait on a phone call with another phone service; and, some may not accomodate your request at a friendly price.) This is another great aspect of having a phone system that's a Software As A Service (SAAS)!