Tracking sales leads right from their origins has been a major challenge for online businesses for a long time. With potent analytics tools such as Google Analytics and Omnituer, it has been relatively easy to precisely track web-based sales leads right down to their timings and geographical locations. But how do you track a sales lead when a customer views a phone number on your website and places a phone call directly to your sales department? We believe that a new technology which is being adopted briskly by many online companies just might help. It is called Dynamic Telephone Number Insertion or DTNI for short.

What is DTNI?

DTNI may sound hi-tech but it is actually rather low-tech. Every campaign you are tracking on or from your website is allotted its unique phone number. For instance, if you decide to track your organic search campaign, those website visitors who arrive on your website through the search engines' organic results would view a distinct telephone number while those arriving on your website through paid search would view a different telephone number. Similarly, the traffic that would arrive on your website through banner ads would view a third phone number.

Unlimited Tracking Potential

Technically and theoretically, there is no end to the number of telephone numbers you could use for tracking purposes. As long as you had access to a large pool, you could even track specific keywords and long tail search phrases using DTNI analytics software. The DTNI technology is cookie-based which means that lead tracking does not cease when a site visitor arrives for the first time on your website, bookmarks your website and returns two days later to execute an e-commerce transaction. Your visitor would still view the original number. Matching up the call records with the analytics tracking data is a matter of simple statistics.

DTNI is by no means perfect and continues to remain in the cadre of evolving technologies. The technology, for instance,  would not be able to accurately track a site visitor if someone wrote down a phone number from your website and simply handed it to a friend-a circumstance that is bound to occur given the current levels of heightened social engagement at the personal level.

Locating a Reliable DTNI Solution

New companies, as is usually the case, have begun to jump on the DTNI bandwagon on a monthly if not a weekly basis. It is best to conduct research on your favorite search engine and opt for those companies that offer a free trial. Some companies also indicate Google Analytics integration and they may be a preferred solution for you if you are already using Google Analytics to track your website's performance.