AdInsight Clarity telephone tracking query

[themegroup]

Hi there. We've been approached by a company called AdInsight, selling their Clarity product for tracking phone calls. It seems to offer a great solution in terms of knowing what keywords are actually effective, and would be particularly useful for a number of our clients whose websites have traditionally low conversion rates on the sites themselves, but which (anecdotally, at least) seem to drive business.

I read up on the kinds of software these products usually use, and found numerous concerns on the negative effects on local search (which is why I looked it up to begin with). Their rep, who talked me through the system, said part of the set up involves setting a default number for people without Javascript, and that each number is used once so is unlikely to be indexed.

I then asked if this counted as cloaking, and he assured me that numerous SEO companies use this product, as do major websites with large internal web teams, and that they would not do anything to compromise their sites. My question is two-fold:

1. Has anyone used this product, and if so did it have negative effects on the local search side of things.

2. Would this count as cloaking, or is it an accepted method of tracking web conversions?

Thanks in advance

[David-Mihm]

Hi Nick,

• Do the clients already have an existing phone number?  Is it well-indexed by Google?  If it is not well-indexed, the client should first establish a permanent phone number and that number should be well-indexed before going ahead with this service.

• In general, dynamic javascript insertion works fine, as long as the existing phone number remains on the page in HTML somewhere, preferably in close proximity to business name and address (the footer is a good place for this).

• Make sure they are NOT sending tracking numbers anywhere outside of this client's website. Period.  No matter what they tell you about how their system is implemented.

[KevinBudzynski]

If the phone numbers is populated by a parameter in a url, just ask Google not to index it in Webmaster Tools may not help---I'm not sure how this company populates the phone number ).