Click to view phone number

[HeaHea]

Well hello there!

We run a local directory site for a specific vertical and use several thousand call tracking numbers (one per listing) to track calls to the local business and report on those metrics (number of calls, appointment set, etc).

We are familiar with dynamic phone number insertion to be able to track phone calls back to the type of traffic or campaign sending it.  If we wanted to implement this, it would require an exorbitant amount of call tracking numbers as we already start out with several thousand numbers to begin with.

We are toying with the idea to hide the phone number in the directory listing and require the user to click to show the full phone number. We know this is an additional action required by the user, but we assume that this would then help us see the folks who are more serious about calling the number of the local business.

We could then use that click metric to then tie out all the goals within GA to look at how effective a given medium is and even look at what content is sending traffic that clicks on the phone number.

Two areas for comments:

1. Any input on others who use this metric?  Any input on if anyone thinks this is a good/bad metric?  Anyone have a better idea/technique?

2. Do you think that the search engines would see this technique as a negative? If so, why or why not?

Thanks!

[seomozinator]

1. We use click metric to track calls from mobile devices for all our clients. It's decent metric (not good, not bad), simply because if I clicked on phone number, it doesn't necessarily mean that i gonna call it - it might have been a mistake, or i just changed my mind. So, It's a metric to get overall idea how many people are at least interested. From experience, those numbers (clicks to actual calls correlation) are pretty close - about 90%. The only other options there is (as far as I know), is call tracking, but that's what you are doing already and trying to stop doing

2. I don't see any reason why it would be bad from Search Engines point of view. The only negative part i see is extra action from user (which you already mentioned) and that crawlers wouldn't be able to see those phone numbers if you do showing through javascript.

[HeaHea]

Thanks Charles for the great input!

Currently, we use a time on business directory page metric to approximate calls.  We did some online surveys to look at how time on a business directory page relates to calls and it was lower than the 90% you mention.  It sounds like the click to view phone number would be a better approximation metric.  We have seen it used in places like Angie's list as well so there may be something there.

FYI - we would still use the call tracking numbers as we need to pull the data on that part of the interaction.  The reason we are looking for a better GA trackable interaction/goal is that we can then use that to fine tune everything else we follow in GA (and the scalability issue mentioned above).  Example, we use Page Value to understand what content leads to conversions.  Right now the Page Value amounts are driven by the goal of time spent on a page in the directory section.  If we update Page Value to use the click to view phone number metric, it could really increase the accuracy of detecting what content drives calls.

Thanks for the confirmation on the second point.  We currently show call tracking numbers for all the local listings and so the "P" portion of the business' NAP on our site is always going to be off on our site anyway. Using the click to show metric would probably not make it any "worse" than it already is.  We ask Santa Claus each year for a schema markup that would let us designate a call tracking number vs regular number, but have not seen it yet.  Maybe this year if we are a really, really good website ... 

Cheers!

[seomozinator]

Yes, I have been talking about click to call correlation of 90%, not time on a page to call Sorry for a confusion.

[HeaHea]

Yes, I follow you.   Your 90% correlation on click to view phone number metric to calls is better than the correlation we found between our time on page metric to calls so that is good!

[seomozinator]

Oh, I see