How to Track Phone Sales in Google Analytics

If you know you can spend one dollar on advertising and get five dollars back consistently, you would do that all day long. But if your business brings in some of your sales over the phone, it can be hard to know what specific campaigns drive sales that lead to someone buying on the phone.

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.

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.

All data about them in Google Analytics is connected back to this user ID. The problem with Phone sales is that the purchase is not logged to their original ID. Instead, it is logged to your phone rep’s ID if they log the purchase on the front end of the website - or it’s not logged in Google analytics at all.

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.

This is done by using the “measurement protocol “in Google Analytics to set the values of the activity you want to log. You just need to include the account of your Google Analytics, the ID number of the customer, and the actual activity you want to log.

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.

It might get confusing to try to break down the entire process here with fully functional code to use, but hopefully, this sparks ideas for you that you can implement with your dev team. The actual mechanics of implementing this are pretty simple for a developer.

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!