There has been a lot of talk lately of how to accurately track your PPC spending across offline. More sites are offering support via chat, phone, and email, and as sites add these abilities they also offer holes into how to track which specific method is successful for any given visitor.

For example, someone coming to your site via a PPC ad may be more willing to talk about a possible order over the phone instead of completing online, where someone coming to the site directly may only need to check on an order that they already placed. If you are paying for a visitor that happens to choose one of these alternate communication channels you want to make sure that the channel is getting proper credit so you can adjust your budgets accordingly.

How? Google Analytics, of course: Recently on the Official Google Analytics blog they demonstrated how a company was able to program GA to register phone calls and chats. The key point of phone tracking as that you use numbers dedicated to PPC, so a visitor coming in from PPC sees a different phone number than someone who clicked on an email or came to the site directly. If you want to take it to the next level you can even get dedicated numbers for each channel, like Google, Yahoo, etc. Include this strategy with GA’s ability to monitor any other online campaign from display ads to email blasts, then you have a pretty good view of how people came to your site, where they came from, and what they did once they got to the site.

Feel free to use any tool at your disposal in order to learn more about your customers and how they interact with your site. Doing so will not only help you better service your customer, but teach you more about who you’re servicing and why they come to you and not someone else. This creates a feedback loop that only leads to greater success.