The following article has been written by James Saunders, Managing Director of Site-Report.com.

A number of our clients have found it difficult to track conversions due to not selling products or services directly on their web sites. However, there are a number of ways that tracking conversions from the offline sale of products and services.

This is part 2 of a 2-part article detailing the key reasons for tracking conversions, the difficulties associated with tracking offline sale of products and services, and the solutions.

Tracking conversions from offline sale of products and services (part 2 of 2)

Taking each method of contact in turn....

(a) email address

If you provide an email address, ensure that you not only set it up as a mailto: that includes your contact email, but also a subject that includes the unique identifier.

(b) contact us form

Ensure that the contact us form does not require more information than necessary. After all, you'll gain useful information from the information you received from the tracking details. Simply pass the unique reference as a hidden field in the form.

(c) snail mail address

This is slightly more difficult but possible to associated contact via snail mail with tracking information. If you can generate a unique identifier that isn't too 'unfriendly', you can dynamically generate a snail mail address that includes a reference number that is actually the unique identifier.

(d) IM address

Tracking visitors that use IM to contact you is very difficult. However, rather than using applications such as Messenger, you can use a 'Live support' application to allow visitors to contact you. These normally including their own tracking functionality that you can use.

(e) Telephone

Other than asking the visitor who contacts you via telephone a barrage of questions regarding what ultimately resulted in them calling you, it is only really possible to track that someone viewed your telephone number. This may not have been on your contact us page and therefore tracking these visitors is difficult.

There's a strong likelihood that your visitors will find your web site outside office hours. In these cases, unless you provide an extended support telephone service, they will have to contact you via one of the other methods. If you aren't able to answer the phone when they have your telephone number to hand, there's a strong likelihood that they'll find a competitor that is able to respond immediately.

If the visitor does decide to contact you via telephone, they may try to call there and then. If you have an answerphone service, they can provide their details and you can call them back. However, you have still not tied that contact to the vital tracking information.

Your visitor may write the number down and think to call you during your office hours (which may not align with theirs due to time differences!) These bits of paper tend to get lost and again subsequent contact is almost impossible to align with tracking information.

This is where a visitor-friendly and tracking friendly alternative wins; the Call Me Back function.

Why 'Call me back' is visitor-friendly

By providing a form that allows the visitors to simply enter a telephone number and (ideally) a preferred time for you to call them back, you are making their life easier. You are also potentially saving them money by not having to call you in the first place.

Why 'Call me back' is tracking friendly

In the same way that you can pass the unique visitor identifier as a hidden field in the contact us form, you can do the same on a 'Call me back' form.

By having this identifier included within the 'call back' message, you can use your tracking software (or an in-house tracking tool) to find out all of the tracking information prior to making the call back to the visitor. This puts you at an advantage when you make that call as you already know a little about the visitor when you speak to them.

For further information, please click here to contact us.

Part 1 of this article

Copyright 2003 Site-Report.com/James Saunders. All Rights Reserved. Reprint rights by written permission of the author.