Ringpool Tracking Mastery Guide (7)
There seems to be some mystery around pay per call tracking. @bigeasy123 recently put out a guide for PPV that works well, but I thought it was important to give the full rundown here on how to use Ringpools the right way. Tracking static numbers can be a lot of work and dynamic number tracking is very powerful.
For those that are unfamiliar with Ringpools, it’s the Invoca/Ring Revenue word for dynamic numbers. This feature allows you to track calls like clicks by sending variables to the tracking platform for every visitor. Other platforms have similar features, but HyperTarget Marketing uses Invoca so I’m giving this tutorial for our publishers who are therefore using Invoca.
Best traffic sources for Ringpools: Search, Display , Email, Social.
Traffic sources not good for Ringpools: PPV/popups (anything high volume, low quality, is going to break your pools. For PPV, every impression is treated like a click, meaning its going to trigger your pool, but your response rate will generally be low, therefore you need a HUGE pool of numbers to use ringpools for PPV that is probably unrealistic. I would follow @bigeasy123's method for PPV)
First step, you may have to request Ringpools as a feature from the network you are working with. Hover over “account” click features, and request ringpools. Ask your AM to enable it for you.
There are 2 main options for Ringpools.
-The Advertisers landing page – If the offer is "web integrated," (it will have the little checkmark next to it) you don’t NEED to set up your own landing page. This is the easiest way, you essentially just grab your link like any normal cpa offer and run traffic to the offer. At HyperTarget, we have most of our offers setup with web integrated pages to make it easy for publishers to run traffic to.
-Your landing page - Requires implementing Invoca’s code on your page, not difficult but you’ll need to dive into this yourself, Invoca has good documentation. I personally recommend you doing “my web page or application” over “my publisher landing page,” as it’s more flexible and powerful, but requires a bit more technical work, you’re going to need to make an API call for example. So for this guide, I’m just gonna use the link example from the publisher landing page option.
Settings:
Choose custom - You’ll need to add and name all the variables you want for your link. If you’re running search, might be as simple as source and keyword. If you’re running display, you’ll probably want to add a bunch more variables like device, browser, carrier etc. Same variables you’d want for a mobile/display campaign.
Tracking numbers reserved for at least: ALWAYS choose 5 minutes. I have not found a realistic reason to use anything longer. Nobody is spending more than 5 minutes on your landing page and you haven’t convinced them to call in those first 5 minutes, they aren’t calling. Using this minimum setting allows you to have a bigger pool that will allow for higher volume traffic without using more numbers. THIS IS ONE OF THE KEYS TO SCALING.
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Once your ringpool is setup and saved, go back into advanced links, and click “get link” next to your ringpool.
This is your affiliate link. Just edit your variables and you’re good to go. I would keep mobile click to call unchecked, otherwise your mobile visitors are going to be prompted to call before they get to your lander. This rarely works, especially for display, people aren’t in the mindset to call yet, and you’re probably going to scare them, so send them to your lander first.
Now before you run traffic, test your link! Make sure the number is dynamic changing. Clear your cache and cookies in your browser and hit your link. You should see the number on the page change. If it works, start pumping traffic.
Reporting: I’ll be quite honest, it could be better.
I think this is why people have given up on Ringpools in the past. Here’s the simplest way to do it though.
Once you have calls coming in, run a report on the campaign. Each number in the pool is going to show up as a different line item, I don’t know why Invoca did it this way, it serves no purpose other than to create extra work. Essentially you need to think of all these line items as one thing. Your ringpool is one thing made up of many numbers, Invoca should have a way to look at it singularly, but they don’t. So here we are.
If it says pooling, it’s working. If it says “pooling overflow” you’re traffic is outpacing your pool. You need to increase the size of your pool if that’s the case. If you’re running PPV, you’ll almost never get it big enough, for all other traffic sources, you should be fine. If needed, you can request a bigger pool than the max from your network, but you should have conversions first, there is a cost associated with large ringpools for your network.
So, back to the report, you’re gonna have to export to excel, Invoca falls short for Ringpool reporting. Make you click “transaction details” for the campaign, set your date range and export.
Now, in excel, sort by paid calls and delete everything else. Sort by “pooling” next and delete everything else. Now you’ve got a list of every call for your pool. Ignore the fact that it’s using different promo numbers, your pool is ONE thing, and you should look at it that way.
Now sum up your earnings, this is how much you made on your pool, again it’s a singular thing, what you see in Invoca is going to confuse you because the revenue shows up on different lines.
Now look over to the right, see “pool parameters” these are all the variables youre tracking. If the pool parameters don’t have a name and value, you did something wrong. Hopefully they do 
IF you’ve gotten this far, you’re all set! Just sort your pool parameters and play with your data.
BONUS: You can setup server to server tracking using what Invoca calls “webhooks” it’s a made up name for postback urls. Pixel tracking doesn’t work, so you can’t fire a pixel from Invoca directly into Google, Facebook, or many traffic platform you might be using. I hear through the grapevine a solution is coming here, but at the moment it doesn’t exist. If you are using 3rd party tracking like
Hover over the gear symbol on the top right, choose webhooks. Setup your postback url and add your "substitution paramenters." (This is Invoca’s word for tokens)
I would set your settings to only fire on paid calls and essentially you’ve got full blown conversion tracking now.
Now go get it peeps! Our publishers that have taken the time to figure this out are on another level.
Very awesome, and in depth guide, thanks for the share!
Nice share, thanks! Most visitors from search (both call-only and bid modifier search ads) never reach the landing page though, so ringpools don't really work for mobile search traffic, right?
As far as I've understood, the only way we can properly track Adwords is to use a Google forwarding# and Google's conversion script on our landing pages. So in that case we only need 1 promonumber right? Cause Google will do the tracking for us and show conversions per ad group. Not sure though if Google generates unique phone#s for each ad group or they just do all the tracking via the script.
Tuquoise, you can send mobile traffic to your landing page, it's your option not to if you want to strictly do call only ads, but in case cases sending mobile search to your landing page works better, just gotta test.
What about using ringpools for PPV for small 10k tests so you can gather data easier. Would 10k pops also be too much?
It's all about frequency. If you're talking 10k over the course of a day or 2 yes you should be okay. But if you're cranking on pops you could do that in an hour or two and you'll need A LOT of numbers to churn though.
My advice to use Ringpools for pops would be to run a banner as your pop that links to your landing page. It might not work so great for tech support but for other verticals it can. Think of this like a squeeze page, you're going to cut down on the number of visitors that actually hit your lander and trigger the ringpool code, but the visitors that get there will be MUCH more engaged as they've clicked through rather than just had something pop over/under on them. Obviously, this may be detrimental to your raw call numbers because you're adding a clickthrough step, but your quality will be much better and you won't break your tracking.
Originally Posted by hypertargeteric
Can you please possibly confirm on my earlier theory as well?
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