Solar Communications have developed an extension for two of the most popular open source website platforms, WordPress and Magento. Wordpress is now responsible for hosting 19% of the entire web whilst Magento is the largest e-commerce site in the world, accounting for 26% of worldwide e-commerce business.
Given the increase in digital advertising, particularly via search engines - Google alone accounted for 41.6% of online advertising spend in 2012 - businesses are now in need of software which can track the online history of offline enquiries or sales. The new, free PPC Call Tracker Extension bridges a gap between online marketing and offline enquiries or sales, enabling businesses to track (offline) telephone calls generated from (online) pay per click (PPC) campaigns.
The PPC Call Tracker Extension displays a unique customer-facing number specific to the search engine (e.g. Google, Yahoo or Bing) that generated the traffic to the company’s website. This enables businesses to access relevant data from their telecoms provider, in order to analyse whether they are receiving phone calls as a result of their Google, Yahoo or Bing ad campaign. The extension is a piece of open source software, and as such, is completely free to use, and suitable for businesses of any size. The unique number displayed is based on the business’s own pre-existing (or recently purchased) virtual telephone number, which will then re-route to their usual contact number.
Jonathan Moran, marketing manager of Solar Communications explains that this extension was developed as a solution to challenges faced within the business itself: “We conceived this extension in response to our own need to accurately monitor and track inbound calls from various online advertising campaigns. Working closely with our developers to create this software over the last few months, we now want other companies to enjoy this extension for free.”