Click-to-call Tracking on Mobile Devices

Click-to-call Tracking on Mobile Devices:


Even though mobile web sites have many metrics in common with their desktop web cousin (e.g. views, visits, visitors, etc.), there are several that are specific to mobile only.  One of these is the click-to-call action.  Although technically there is no “click” with this action on smartphones, the idea is to capture when a user selects or touches a phone number to call.  For many business types (e.g. hotels, restaurants, brick-and-mortar stores, local services, etc.) click-to-call tracking can be a very valuable metric to capture, including for mobile ad campaigns where click-to-call is the call to action (as shown in above image).
The HTML hyperlink syntax for click-to-call is rather straightforward for current smartphones (iPhone and Android):

<a href=”tel:18015556766″>Click to dial (801) 555-6766</a>
However, for feature phones (WAP) or older Blackberry devices the URL schema is different:

<a href=”wtai://wp/mc;18015556766″>Click to dial (801) 555-6766</a>
To capture data in SiteCatalyst from the click-to-call action we use a “redirect” (REDIR) which will send the data to Adobe before the actual call is initiated.  However, before including the redirect, we must decide what information would be valuable to capture.  Below is a simple list of dimensions and metrics that we’ll capture in this example.  Obviously this list would be adjusted, including specific variables, for your particular needs.
Click-to-Call Action: event11

Number Dialed: prop20, evar20
Here are the variables with their respective values using a dynamic variable to copy the value of  eVar20 into prop20.
events=event11&eVar20=801-555-6766&prop20=D=v20
Because we don’t want this action to generate a page view within SiteCatalyst reporting, we need to create the equivalent of a trackLink call.  To do this we need to include these extra variables:
pe=lnk_o

pev2=Click-to-Call
The value for pev2 can be customized to whatever you want.  This variable populates the “Custom Links” report.
Next we need to set the URL which Adobe will redirect to (example below is for smarpthones).
url=tel:18015556766
Now that we have defined the various variables that are submitted to Adobe, let’s look at the entire string:
url=tel:18015556766&events=event11&eVar20=801-555-6766&prop20=D=v20&pe=lnk_o&pev2=Click-to-Call
However, to work properly we need to URL encode each of the variable values where needed.  We also should use the proper URL abbreviations for variable names (events=ev, eVar=v, prop=c)
url=tel%3A18015556766&ev=event11&v20=801-555-6766&c20=D%3Dv20&pe=lnk_o&pev2=Click-to-Call

Bringing it All Together
Finally, we include the redirect parameters from above into the URL that is submitted to Adobe.  Please adjust the domain (jsptest123.122.2o7.net) and report suite (jsptest123) according to your specific needs.
<a href="http://jsptest123.122.2o7.net/b/ss/jsptest123/5.4/REDIR?url=tel%3A18015556766&ev=event11&v20=801-555-6766&c20=D%3Dv20&pe=lnk_o&pev2=Click-to-Call">1-801-555-6766</a>
To see this in action, here’s a working example.  If you want to actually make a call (to the fictitious number), you will need to access this link from your mobile phone.

Additional Considerations
Be sure you are set-up to use first-party cookies on your mobile site (e.g. metrics.yourdomain.com). If you don’t you will overcount the number of unique visitors when using the above redirect.  Also, for SiteCatalyst v15 customers, you could leverage contextData in place of setting variables explicitly.  So instead of setting event11, prop20 and eVar20, we simply set a ContextData variable with phoneNumber=801–555-6766.   Within the SiteCatalyst admin we then create a Processing Rule that would map the phoneNumber ContextData variable value to prop20 and eVar20 and fire event11 at the same time.