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Call Tracking

TL;DR - What is this tutorial about?

Harness Cloudonix's WebRTC and voice application engine for building a straightforward call tracking tool. Optimize your online media spend by correlating it with inbound calls effortlessly!

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This document is mildly out-dated, but still applicable.

Call Tracking makes use of various techniques, such as click-to-call and click-to-callback. Cloudonix enables a more advanced method called Web-To-Call, providing additional functionality beyond the scope of Click-To-Call and Click-To-Callback.

What is Click-To-Call?​

Click-to-call, otherwise known as click-to-talk, click-to-dial or click-to-callback, allows people to connect with company representatives by phone while browsing a web application or within a mobile application.

Click-To-Call is the basis of Call Tracking - so we shall now explain how traditional Click-To-Call solutions work, and the fundamental difference between Click-To-Call and the Cloudonix Web-To-Call solution.

Why Click-To-Call?​

Data! it's all around us, flooding our senses and our mental capacity. The average person is capable of spending no more 25 seconds reading text online, rapidly seeking a call to action. In most cases, when your customer visits your website, specifically when seeking to obtain information or make a purchase - they will seek to converse with a human being.

Click-to-call is an easy way for your customers to contact your sales or care agents, directly. from your website. In most cases, Click-To-Call will be one of the following scenarios:

Click-To-Call​

This scenario is mostly applicable for mobile devices.

In a Click-To-Call scenario, your customers will fill their phone number into a form (with some additional information). Once filled, the server side will then create a POST to your remote server to indicate the new prospect. E.g.

curl -X POST "https://remote-server.com/get_tracking_number" \
-H "accept: application/json" -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d { "email":"myuser@mydomain.com", "phone":"1212777890", "fullname": "some name" }

The response back to the browser shall normally include an ephemeral phone number. Eg.

{
  "status": "success",
  "message": "ephemeral phone number assigned",
  "phonenumber": "12564567890"
}

At this point, a tel: based link will be invoked by the mobile browser, with the following number assigned:

<a href='tel:12564567890'>Click Here to Call</a>

Once the customer will click on the link, the browser will change focus to the native phone application, initiating a call to 12564567890 from the native dialer.

Pros and Cons​

The main pro point here is simplicity - every phone has a native dialer and the implementation is fairly straight forward to implement. However, there are multiple cons to this method:

  • Requires multiple phone numbers to serve many customers - costly
  • Requires multiple call minutes to serve many customers - costly
  • Making the call from the native dialer looses all analytical data and call context

In other words, while the method is simple and straight forward - it is far from being ideal from a financial standpoint. In addition, the loss of analytical data while dropping from the web application to the native dialer - contributes to degraded customer interactions.

Click-To-Callback​

This scenario is applicable for both mobile and desktop browsers.

In a Click-To-Callback scenario, your customers will fill their phone number into a form (with some additional information). Once filled, the server side will then create a POST to your remote server to indicate the new prospect. Eg.

curl -X POST "https://remote-server.com/get_tracking_number" \
-H "accept: application/json" -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d { "email":"myuser@mydomain.com", "phone":"1212777890", "fullname": "some name" }

In this case, the response simple indicates that the request had been received. Eg.

{
  "status": "success",
  "message": "Callback request queued, please wait..."
}

At this point, the remote server side will issue a request to the telephony service provider (eg. Twilio®, Nexmo® or other) to create a callback to the customer. A callback will normally call the sales agent first, then once a sales agent answers he will be connected to the customer.

Pros and Cons​

While this scenario is mildly more complex than Click-To-Call, it is still relatively simple and straight forward to implement. The added value is a slightly more robust level of analytical data - that is directly tied to the issuing of the callback request.

However, there are multiple cons to this method:

  • Requires multiple call minutes to serve many customers - costly
  • For each customer there are 2 calls being issued - double the minute costs
  • If the company is global, international calling rates apply - costly
  • If no agents are available at the point, or the form had been submitted off-hours, the customer may forget that he even filled th form - wasted funds on calls

In other words, while the method is simple and straight forward - it is far from being ideal from a financial standpoint. In addition, as time progresses, and callback is performed relatively away from the form fill time, chances of closing a sale degrades rapidly.