Ways To Track Phone Sales From PPC / AdWords in NetSuite

How do you measure the true return on PPC ad spend when phone leads or phone sales are not being taken into account?

If we take a typical e-commerce store as an example, up to 35% of sales can be taken over the telephone. Accurately attributing these sales can make a big difference to how you optimise your PPC campaigns, and have an effect on the overall ROI from paid search marketing.

Most web analytics solutions do a great job of tracking where sales come from, be it from organic search traffic, direct type-in traffic or PPC traffic. However, the source of telephone orders is one area that site owners often choose to ignore because it’s difficult to track.

Here’s a few ways to track PPC traffic that generates orders over the phone.

1. Use Unique Promo Codes On PPC Landing Pages

This can be achieved by tagging your urls with a CGI parameter, such as “?leadsource=adwords”. With a bit of code you can get this code printed on the page, as “Promo:adwords” in the footer will work fine. When customers call and place an order make sure everyone is trained to ask them for their “promo” code, which gets stored with an order placed over the phone.

Furthermore, you could be a little more cryptic with your promo codes if you want to hide what you’re doing from your customers. Using custom promotional codes works well if you are running large PPC campaigns with hundreds of keywords and landing pages.

2. Use A Unique Telephone Number On Landing Pages

This is a very simple but effective technique: switch the telephone number based on the referring site. If you wanted to be thorough you could get a telephone number for MSN, Yahoo or AdWords. This method is more suitable for sites offering a limited product range and bid on a small range of keywords.

3. Use A Pay Per Call Service

Set up a new telephone number and then put that number on your landing page. Pay Per Call services come with powerful stats so you can measure just how many calls you have received. Also using a service such as Ingenio means you only pay for phone call leads from new customers calling your business.

4. Track Sales With Specialist Telephone Call Conversion Software

Choose a solution such as that provided by ClickPath to track all conversions generated from your online advertising, including phone calls, and tie them back to the exact keyword or ad source.
5. Use An IVR Phone System

Harnessing the power of an IVR phone system can take the headaches out of getting your staff to record the lead source. You could add an extra menu on your phone system asking people for a promo code that is unique to the referring site.

All these techniques can be done in your NetSuite Store. So tracking offline sales in NetSuite is a possible now!

Using PayPal and NetSuite

When the customer completes checkout, a sales order is created
in NetSuite with payment authorized by PayPal. The sales order
status in NetSuite is either pending fulfillment or pending
approval, depending on your accounting settings. When you bill
the order, payment is received from PayPal.

After an order is created, NetSuite initiates an authorization
request to PayPal for the full order amount. When the Web store
shopper approves the authorization, a three day honor period
begins. PayPal places a hold on the shopper’s payment
account for the amount of the order to ensure availability of
the funds for capture.

During the three day honor period, you are guaranteed to capture
the funds as long as the authorization is valid. Please contact
PayPal for more information about their validation process.
You have three days from the time the order is created to
fulfill the order and capture the funds. If you attempt to
capture the funds after the three day honor period, NetSuite
voids the original authorization, initiates a new authorization,
and attempts to capture the funds. By default your PayPal
account is restricted to a single authorization. NetSuite can
initiate only as many authorizations as your paypal account
allows within a 29 day period.

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The Importance of Having a Clear Vision and Goal for your Web Store

If you don't know what you are trying to achieve with your web site design then you will probably achieve … nothing!

Just as your company (hopefully) has a clear vision of where it wants to be in the future and what it wants to develop into - your web site design also needs to have a clear vision.

The vision for your web site design should be aligned with your company’s overall vision.

Ask yourself:

* what is the vision for this web site design?
* why are we getting a web site?
* what is the purpose of your web site design?

Next, think, what are the goals for this web site design? Be specific. What do you want to achieve through a web site? Think about the following areas:

* Enquiries
* Sales - eCommerce
* Brand development
* Business efficiency

Put specifics on everything. How many enquiries or sales would you like to generate through your web site? What would make your web site an amazing success? Many people decide to get a web site without defining the reasons behind their decision. Once again, know exactly what you are trying to achieve!

8-Word Search Queries Up 34,000% (5 Years)

If a picture is worth a thousand words, we might want to start scanning-in images of what we’re trying to find on the search engines. As new data from Hitwise suggests, we’re gradually starting to use more & more keywords when conducting our search engine queries.

Hitwise compared January 2009’s data with last year’s, but I want to take you back farther in time–5 years in fact! Not that my memory goes back that far, but I did remember covering this data for my old blog: Search Engine Lowdown.

Here are the numbers from this year, with Feb 2004’s numbers in parentheses:

1-word searches = 20.29% (19.02%)

2-word searches = 23.65% (32.58%)

3-word searches = 21.92% (25.61%)

4-word searches = 14.89% (12.83%)

5-word searches = 8.68% (5.64%)

6-word searches = 4.65% (2.32%)

7-word searches = 2.49% (0.98%)

8-word searches = 3.43% (no one did 8-word searches in 2004!)

As you can see, there’s been a significant drop in the number of people using 2- and 3-word searches, while those using 5-words and above are becoming more common–likely from those of us that cut-and-paste large quantities of text into Google.

One interesting observation: the number of people using 1-word searches has remained surprisingly similar–in fact, showing a small increase in the past 5 years. This either means that the search engines are getting better at delivering relevant search results, or more “brand” searches are being made, or some of us are just committed to being lazy with our searching. ;-)