Overview of Tracking Sources (Advertising Channels)

You can track any onsite or offsite advertising channels through CallTrackingMetrics.

Onsite sources are advertising channels that drive traffic to your website. When visitors come from one of those sources, a tracking number will dynamically appear on your website. You need to install our dynamic tracking code, which you can find here.

Offsite sources are advertising channels where tracking numbers appear OFF of your website —in a TV ad, a postcard, a flyer, etc. You do not need to install our tracking code on your website if you are just tracking offsite sources.

Preset Tracking Sources:

In our system, most of the onsite and offsite sources you want to track are created as Preset Tracking Sources. You can choose from them in the Tracking Source drop-down when configuring new tracking numbers on the buy numbers page.

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You can update/change the source for a tracking number by going to the Tracking Numbers page and clicking edit in the tracking source field. If the source you want to use does not already exist in our system as a Preset Tracking Source, you can add it to the tracking sources page and then associate tracking numbers. Read more about creating custom tracking sources.

Please note that preset tracking sources are available to decrease the setup required for tracking attribution in your account. However, our script will only reference information available in the landing or referring URL for a website visitor, so you must confirm your tracking sources are aligned with your marketing. For example, our Google My Business/Google Business Profile source assumes that you have your business profile’s web address set up with the identifying parameters “utm_campaign=gmb”. You can change the UTM parameters in the Matching Conditions of the Tracking Source if you're using something different on your website. 

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Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

This is specifically for AMP landing pages.

Ad Extension

Place these tracking numbers in your Google Ads Ad Extensions. Once you have purchased the numbers in our system and associated them with this source, go into Google Ads and add these tracking numbers as extensions. This is an offsite source because the numbers appear in the actual ads in search results, not on your website.

Bing Local

Tracking numbers associated with this source will dynamically display to Bing Local visitors to your website. 

Bing Paid

Tracking numbers associated with this source will dynamically display to visitors to your website clicking through from a Bing Ads ad. You will need to ensure that auto-tagging is enabled in Bing Ads.

Bing Organic

Tracking numbers associated with this source will dynamically display to visitors coming from a Bing search. You will be able to see the search queries that each visitor used in the activity reports---> calls by search term.

CAKE

Track calls as conversions generated through your CAKE-powered offers. The preset requires the visitor to have “ctreqid=” in the landing URL.

Direct

Tracking numbers associated with this source will dynamically display to visitors to your website who go directly to the URL (i.e., they type the URL into their navigation bar).

Email

By default, this is an offline source, which means the tracking number won't be dynamically showing on your website-- but rather, it's a phone number that you can place in your emails.

If you want a tracking number that dynamically displays on your website when someone clicks through from your email links, then you should edit the email source to be an onsite source and program the source based on how the click-through URLs are programmed in your email client. (for example-- we recommend using something like utm_medium=email in the Landing URL field). You can typically control the tagging for your email links within your email client.)

Facebook

By default, this is an online source, meaning the tracking number will dynamically display to visitors to your website who have landed there from Facebook.

Facebook Page

Display a tracking number directly on your Facebook page. 

Facebook Paid

Tracking numbers associated with this source will dynamically display to visitors to your website clicking through from a Facebook Ad. We recommend using something like utm_source=facebook in the Landing URL field. 

Google Ads

Tracking numbers associated with this source will dynamically display to visitors to your website clicking through from a Google Ads ad.

Make sure you have Auto Tagging enabled in your Google Ads account to use this source as we look for a gclid in the landing URLs.

Google My Business 

Place these tracking numbers in your Google My Business profile. This is an onsite source for visitors clicking through to your website from your Google My Business profile. An offsite Google My Business tracking source can also be created to display a tracking number in your Google My Business listing. The preset requires that visitors have “utm_campaign=gmb” in the landing URL, but you can adjust to match your preferred UTM parameters.

Google Organic

Tracking numbers associated with this source will display dynamically to visitors coming from a Google organic search. You will be able to see the search queries that each visitor used in the activity reports, found under Reports > Activity Reports > calls by search term.

Do not place these numbers in your Google My Business Listings. If you wish to use a tracking number in your Local Listing, you should instead choose "Google My Business" as the source and then program that tracking number into your Google business profile.

Multi-Organic Search

Tracking numbers will dynamically display to visitors on your site from any of the top organic searches. 

Referral

Tracking numbers associated with this source will dynamically display to visitors to your website from another website. If you are tracking other sources, they will trump this source. Referral can be thought of as a catch-all source for referral sources of traffic to your website. We would recommend breaking out major referral sources like Google Organic, Google Ads, Bing,  etc. separately for data quality purposes.

Television, Radio, and Print

Place these tracking numbers in your ads so that visitors can call the number as they see or hear the ads. Since they are offsite sources, they are not designed to appear dynamically on your website.

Website

Tracking numbers associated with this source will dynamically display to all visitors to your website-- direct or through another website. Calls that come in through this tracking number will be recorded as the source website. If you want to have more granularity in calls by source reports, then we would recommend using additional sources as described herein.

Twitter

Tracking numbers associated with this source will dynamically display to visitors coming from Twitter to your site.

Yahoo Local

Tracking numbers associated with this source will dynamically display to website visitors referred from local.yahoo.com. 

Yahoo Organic

Tracking numbers associated with this source will dynamically display to visitors coming from a Yahoo organic search.

YouTube

Tracking numbers associated with this source will dynamically display to visitors coming from YouTube to your site.

 

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