How to Track Calls from Mobile Pages using Event Tracking

As an internet marketing agency, we are always be looking for methods to track and optimize our efforts.  Google Analytics offers event tracking as part of their growing suite of analytics features.  Our team was tasked with creating mobile landing pages for our cremation services company and we wanted to track how many people click on the phone number.  An “out of the box” Google Analytics implementation doesn’t do this automatically without some alterations to the code for event tracking.  The following steps will teach you how to set this up on your own sites and clients

Step 1 – Create your mobile landing page.  As we’re working on many local clients these days, we opted to purchase Mobile LP plugin for wordpress.  The editor allows for some great custom elements and easy creation (and duplication) of landing pages.  Make sure you include your phone number ABOVE THE FOLD, so people can see it without scrolling.  Also, be sure to  make that number text and not an image.  Text based numbers are typically clickable on touch screen phones.

Step 2 – Bold the phone number.  We need something with brackets in the HTML code to insert the “onClick” event tracker.  When viewing the HTML of your page, your number should look something like this:

“<strong>(800) 123-4567</strong>”

Step 3 – Insert your event tracking code.  For assistance with this, have a quick read of the event tracking guidelines on Google’s Code site. You will need to establish what you “Category”, “Action” and “Label” (plus a “Value” if you wish) for your tracking.  In our case, we chose the following: Category = “Phone -Call”, Action = “Mobile-Click”, Label = “City-Number-Example”

Using our example above, your code will look something like this:

“<strong onclick=”_gaq.push([‘_trackEvent’, ‘Phone-Call’, ‘Mobile-Click’, ‘City-Number-Example’]);”>(800) 123-4567</strong>”

Step 4 – Once your pages are re-published, its time to test them and make sure you haven’t broken anything.  Have a look on your phone or using a phone browser emulator like iphoney or JohnRampton has a few..  If your checking on your phone, be sure to click the number.  This will trigger the event tracking code to register an event in Google Analytics.

Step 5 – Check your Google Analytics stats in a few hours to make sure your Actions, Category and Label is showing up.

Step 6 – Set-up your event as a Goal in Google Analytics.  You will need to use the new version of Google Analytics to do this.

Step 7 (optional) – If your running Google Adwords and want to track these goals as conversions, you can do so by ensuring your two accounts are linked together.  Next, after you have registered a goal in Analytics, visit the “Tools and Analysis” tab in Google Adwords.  Select “Conversions”

If you’ve done everything correctly, you are now tracking mobile phone calls from your mobile landing pages and seeing this data in Google Analytics and Google Adwords.  The advantage to Step 7 is now you can optimize keyword level data and improve your PPC account.  Happy marketing!