As the Icelandic volcano Grimsvotn begins to die down after a number of flight delays to some parts of the UK and Europe, many leisure and business travellers might be left wondering what could possibly happen next. After all, it was only a year ago that the hard to pronouce Eyjafjallajokull volcano caused widespread delays to many holiday plans to sun seekers. When Grimsvotn began to erupt again recently, the media presented it as a case of “here we go again”. However, the reality seems to be a more short-lived inconvenience that is expected to clear up in a few days’ time.

But this has got our minds whirring – if an event like this happens, how can you tell which calls to your travel business are actually to do with it, and which are associated with holiday sales? If you haven’t got a call tracking service worked into your website, now is the time to see just how valuable it can be.

Put yourself in the shoes of a holidaymaker for a moment. You’ve just heard that another ash cloud is making it’s way down the UK, which could put your flight at risk. You’ve paid good money for your holiday, and your priority is to make sure you won’t lose out if conditions don’t improve. In this case, you want to ring up to talk to a representative from that company, so you might visit the website directly or do a “brand” search on a search engine to find a telephone number.

In this event, it is highly unlikely that you would type a “non-brand” phrase, such as “holidays to Majorca” or “cheap holidays to Magaluf” into a search enginge, as it wasn’t your goal to find information about booking a completely different trip. Once you find the phone number on the site, you then ring up and speak to the customer representative, which would hopefully relieve your worries.

However, what if you want to make a call unrelated to the Icelandic volcano? Maybe you fancy booking a winter escape, or perhaps your summer holiday for next year. In this event, you may just type “cheap holidays to Majorca” into the search engine, before entering the website through this keyword. You may then do some research on the website before calling to book your trip by phone.

Clearly, these phone calls are very different, and you need to be able to distinguish between them. Luckily, there are tools such as Google Analytics available so you can see how customers have landed on your website, and the pages which they viewed. You can also create goals so you see whether these visits have converted into sales online. When customers decide to pick up the phone during this visit, you might think that it all gets quite hazy; how can you possibly attribute a phone call to a web visit?

Call tracking technology does just this. Visitor level call tracking works by allocating a unique number to each visitor on the site at one time, so you can then draw lines between a visitor and their phone call. This is more advanced than keyword level call tracking which requires that you have a unique phone number for each keyword; this could be an extensive and an expensive option. Visitor level call tracking lets you track keywords without needing to specify them beforehand; you’ll just see exactly what they typed into a search engine, even if the term was misspelled.

Therefore, you can improve the insights you have into sales during a difficult time such as a volcanic ash cloud threatening your business. Then again, you’ll also be able to find uses for call tracking aside from this, such as whether your PPC ads are resulting in phone calls, and whether your SEO campaigns are being as effective as you would hope.