Need to track Adwords keyword clicks to telephone calls?

Anyone working with Google AdWords will tell you that the number one goal is to accurately track the ROI (Return on investment) of your AdWords spend. This is, after all the beauty of Adwords - it allows a level of tracking which other forms of marketing (including some other online activities) cannot match.

Of course it is always easiest to track e-commerce activity - simply enabling the e-commerce module within Google Analytics and adding a piece of code to post payment pages takes care of that. Lead generation via form capture can also be fairly simply tracked using the goals features within Google Analytics.

One scenario which has always proven difficult to track though has been lead generation, such as telephone calls. Someone clicks on an ad, visits your site then makes a call to you - how do you know what ad they clicked on? Without that data, making sense of your AdWords spend and formulating an ROI is very difficult.

There are products on the market such as the excellent Clarity from Adinsight which can answer this question though. Using sophisticated telephone routing and server querying software they can accurately track the source of a call to your business.

Source calls can be split between PPC and SEO generated traffic and data can be generated to keyword level providing the caller is still on the site at the point they call you. Using this information it is possible to build an accurate ROI model over time.