Retail businesses in the UK will know the magnitude of the Christmas shopping period, but many are missing out on crucial details about how shoppers actually converted online or offline.

Take a leather sofa for example; this type of purchase may require an amount of visits to a website and an enquiry by phone before it is actually ordered by a person. In order to connect the dots between the visits to the website, the telephone call and the purchase, call tracking services can be used to great effect. This is of particular value to those more expensive items, whether sofas or otherwise.

There are many sectors that might see a lift in phone calls during the Christmas period, and this doesn’t just apply to retail products. One example might be for the services of a plumber. It is true that many people often travel to see family during the festive season, and if they go during a cold snap and return home to find a burst pipe they might call out for a plumber. To find a phone number, they might access the company’s website after searching for “burst pipe plumber in Inverness” on Google.

Both of these examples demonstrate the importance for these companies to understand where these customers had come from on their buying journey in order to strategize their future marketing spend to reach those who are seeking their products or services. Call tracking systems are designed for this purpose. Advanced call tracking, and visitor level call tracking in particular, goes further than keyword level in order for you to learn more about the visitor’s history before they actually converted.

The Christmas period makes it even more imperative to track these phone calls as it is likely that as a retail business or seasonal service you will be using a high sum of your marketing budget. There are many different media that you may use to promote yourselves during this period: SEO, PPC, online display, TV, radio, print, etc. Being able to easily track your return on investment for each type of ad spend is invaluable, which is why call tracking is so valuable.

A good call tracking solution will be able to automatically create campaigns when it sees traffic coming from different online sources, and it should also allow you to use the system offline by creating unique single numbers for offline advertising. This means that you would be able to allocate a different number for your TV ads, another for print ads, etc. If you wanted to, you could even go further than this and use a unique number for each publication if you want to find out which is the most effective for your company.