Ifbyphone mashes up with Google Analytics

Telephone Application platform provider Ifbyphone this week debuted some clever engineering that brings call-detail data into Google Analytics, a mashup that lets marketers track the results of phone-based direct marketing right alongside measurements of Web traffic.

Ifbyphone fits in with a handful of platform plays like Ribbit or Jadaku in providing an open platform for telecom application development. Typical capabilities of such platforms, including Ifbyphone, embedded click-to-call links on Web pages and communications-enablement of Web-based apps, like Salesforce.com.

This time around, Ifbyphone addresses one of the key challenges of interactive marketing: Web and email interactions are infinitely trackable, but most marketers lose track of customer interactions once they go to the phone. Its new mashup combines Google Analytics, Google AdSense and its own platform to track the effectiveness of lead-generation campaigns across the Web and call-stream environments, said Ifbyphone CEO Irv Shapiro, in an interview.

While many small- and medium-sized businesses rely on the free Google Analytics for Web traffic, many businesses “have a significant portion of their businesses that obviously have nothing to do with the Web. They have Yellow Pages ads. They get and make phone calls,” said Shapiro. “They can tune up their Web site, see that visits are up, but they don’t know if they are actually generating increased sales.”

Ifbyphone’s solution is to provide marketers with unique, specifically assigned telephone numbers that they can publish offline – in ads, in printed literature or in radio spots, for instance. When those numbers are called, Ifbyphone’s phone application platform essentially creates a “pseudo” Web page hit that is then reported to Google Analytics. The call-detail data from Ifbyphone and the Web-site statistics from Google Analytics can then be mashed up to see how well a particular ad pulled as part of an integrated marketing campaign, Shapiro said.