If you're confident that investing one dollar in advertising consistently yields five dollars in return, you'd stick with it all day long. However, if your business generates some sales over the phone, it can be challenging to determine which specific campaigns are driving those phone sales conversions. Integrating Google Analytics can help track and analyze these conversions more accurately.

But with just a few technical steps, it’s easy to push phone sales data back into google analytics. This gives you the ability to know exactly where the visitor came from as if they purchased directly on your website without calling. From there, you can scale up those marketing efforts to drive more and more sales over the phone.

At HelpFlow, we provide 24/7 live chat teams for over 100 e-commerce stores. We close a lot of sales directly on chat which tracks in Google analytics, but some chats turn into leads that the client closes on the phone. We use this process to push phone sales data back into Google analytics to show massive ROI.

In this post, I will break down how you can do the same to track phone sales in Google analytics.

Google Analytics Integration: Display the Google Analytics ID Number

When someone visits your website, Google Analytics assigns them an ID. This is basically a number that identifies their visit in an anonymous way.

In Google Analytics, each visitor’s data is linked to a unique user ID. The challenge with phone sales is that purchases aren’t always recorded under the customer’s original ID. Instead, they might be registered under your phone representative’s ID if they enter the purchase on the website’s front end. This can complicate Google Analytics integration for tracking sales accurately.

It’s pretty simple to display this ID in the footer of your website to enable a visitor to see it when your phone team asks them for it.

Here’s a starting point for the code:

ga('create', 'UA-XXXXX-Y', 'auto', {
userId: USER_ID
});
ga('send', 'pageview'); 

Ask for the ID, Naturally

When you get someone on the phone to take a phone order, they will likely be on the website looking at the product. Since you have displayed the ID somewhere simply on your website, such as the footer, you can naturally ask them for the ID number.

Something simple along the lines of the following works well. Make it seem like it’s their benefit, which it technically is since you’re trying to connect the dots of the data.

“Can you take a look at the bottom of the website where it says customer ID. What is that number? This will help me connect this back to the right products and information on our website.”

Once you have that ID, your team has what you need to push the sale back into Google analytics once they close the sale. You don’t need anything else from the customer.

Log the Sale in Google Analytics

Once the sale happens, all you need to do is push the sale back into the Google Analytics account using the ID number. This will log the activity on the customer’s Google Analytics record as if they did it on your website.

To track specific activities, Google Analytics integration utilizes the ‘measurement protocol.’ You simply include your Google Analytics account, the customer’s ID number, and the details of the activity you wish to record.

Here’s an example:

www.google-analytics.com v=1&t=pageview&tid=UA-XXXXXX-YY&cid=12345.54321&***

The XXX is your google analytics number, the cid is the customer number, and the *** is the specific activity you want to log. For example, a transaction with a specific product and dollar figure. This is best so the actual revenue is tracked directly within Google analytics.

Explaining the entire process with fully functional code here might be overwhelming, but this should give you some concepts that you can work on with your development team. The actual steps for Google Analytics integration are quite straightforward for a developer to implement.

Have Questions?

Like I said, We run 24/7 live chat teams for over 100 e-commerce stores. We use this to tie back chat lead revenue from phone orders back into Google Analytics, but it can be used for a wide range of use cases.

If you get more than 5% of your revenue coming from phone orders, this can be very insightful information. Give it a shot with your team.

If you have any questions, I’m happy to clarify the details in a Strategy Call. Even if we do not work together, you’ll get a ton of value from strategizing on the call together. Book a time that works for you by clicking below. Always happy to help!