All large companies do some percentage of sales over the phone. If you are unable to tell where that phone call came from, and I'm not talking about knowing it came from your Web site or even knowing that it came from Yahoo versus Google, it's not good enough. You need to know specifically which keyword was involved in bringing that visitor to your Web site. Here's one way in which you are able to accomplish that.

Say someone goes ahead and clicks on an ad for "flat screen TV", which brings them to your Web site. Prior to getting users to your Web site, you would assign each keyword, "flat screen TV" is this example, with a keyword ID (3378). Now, the person clicks on your ad, they go to your Web site, and on your Web site, that number, (3378), is embedded somewhere dynamically. When they pick up the phone, they assign the call, and the person takes the order over the phone and gets all the important information from the customer, including, "Who are you?", "What do you want to buy?", and most importantly, "What's your credit card number," then submit this information. The last step to completing the order is asking the customer to go to a spot on your Web site or, as our clients do, go to the bottom right-hand corner of your site and read the number over the phone.

From there, the keyword ID number, (3378), is taken and entered into their order entry system, where, at the end of the night, a marketing person can run a report for all Web orders that have a keyword id. They can then translate that keyword ID, (3378), to the keyword "flat screen TV" and know that keyword, in addition to the orders that it helped to generate online, also contributed to a phone order, which it needs credit for. Which begs the question, if you're not doing this today, how many of your keywords have you turned off or reduced bid prices on because you didn't think they were generating sales?

The reality might be that those keyword sales predominately happen over the telephone.

We go one step further than this. Rather than use a keyword ID, we use what's called a "session ID". The difference between the two is a person clicked on three ads, you would only know about the last ad in the sequence if you used keyword ID's. So, ClearSaleing developed the technology that can look at the Purchase Path. When someone clicks on an ad and they give the ID to the phone operator, we not only know the last ad they clicked on, but we know all the ads they clicked on in their purchase path. We can then apply the revenue credit equally to make use of our Even ROI calculation methodology.