What is the difference between source tracking vs keyword / visitor tracking?
Please read the following blog article on CallRail’s website
https://www.callrail.com/blog/source-tracking-keyword-tracking/
Last Updated on July 24, 2020
How to Setup a Keyword Tracking Number
So before you start creating the tracking number within CallRail you need to find out how many tracking numbers you will need in the number pool to ensure that there are enough numbers for all of the visitors on your site at any given time.
To do this, you will need to go to Google Analytics and look at their peak hourly traffic. I would recommend looking at the peak hourly traffic in an unfiltered view to make sure you aren’t under estimating it. Once you find the peak hourly traffic you take that number and divide it by 4 and that will tell you how many numbers CallRail recommends that you have in your number pool. So if a client’s peak hourly traffic is 32 visitors you divide 32 by 4 which gives you 8 so you would need a number pool with 8 numbers. The smallest number pool you can have is 4 numbers so if the peak hourly traffic is 16 or less then the size of the number pool will need to be 4.
What CallRail says about Keyword Tracking – https://support.callrail.com/hc/en-us/articles/203949129-Keyword-Tracking-Basics
Keyword tracking will track each visitor and give data on how they came to the site, the pages they visited, and the page they were on when they called in. Also, within CallRail it will also track a call timeline for the person if they call in multiple times.
Once you know the size of the number pool you need you can go to CallRail and setup the tracking numbers.
- Make sure you are in the right account and company.
- Click on the “Create Number” button in the top right corner.
- Follow the prompts. They should be easy to follow and self explanatory.
- “Ill use it online”
- “On my website”
- “Track visitor activity”
- Give the number pool a name
- Set the pool size based on the criteria above
- Enter the number you want the calls to forward to
- Set what visitors you want to track
- Typically with keyword tracking you can go ahead and track all Visitors.
- Choose the area code for the tracking numbers to come from
How to setup a source tracking number
- Make sure you are in the right account and company.
- Click on the “Create Number” button in the top right corner.
- Follow the prompts. They should be easy to follow and self explanatory.
If you are wanting to track Google Organic calls on the website you would do the following:
- “Ill use it online”
- “On my website”
- “Track a marketing campaign”
- Give the number a name
- Enter the number you want the calls to forward to
- Set how you want to track the visitors
- For Google Organic calls you would choose “Search visitors from Google for Organic search”
- Select a tracking number – Toll free numbers cost extra
What CallRail says about Source Tracking – https://support.callrail.com/hc/en-us/articles/204596305-Source-Tracking-Basics
Source tracking is used to associate 1 tracking number with one “source”. Typically Sebo uses source tracking when we only want to track specific types of sources such as:
- Organic Search
- Paid Search
- Direct Traffic
- Referral Traffic
If the client is using their own CallRail account you really should use Keyword Tracking unless they want to keep their call volume down. Also, if you are going to want to track more than 2 different sources of traffic coming to the website you may want to consider Keyword Tracking for that as well.