A CALL-TRACKING service inspired by Google Analytics is being touted as the most sophisticated way to track returns on investment in inbound telephony marketing.

Jet Interactive, a telco that provides 1300, 1800 and 13 numbers, launched its Call Tracker feature two months ago as a free add-on to its telephony service.

Jet chief executive Justin Graham said some inbound call tracking systems provided reporting on a state basis, but Call Tracker was the only one able to drill down to suburbs and towns to provide demographic profiles on callers. "Really large companies needed greater detail (in their tracking). I was able to break up the call areas into (telephony) exchanges as my point of differentiation, and there are 5000 exchanges across the country."

But as that gave almost too much information, the only way it could be easily accessible was by adding electronic mapping tools. "From that point I had a highly differentiated product which was also all online."

Access to the exchange data also provides new information, such as where missed calls or calls that received a "busy" signal originated.

"That's interesting if you're running Pizza Hut and have 1000 calls at any time across different states which can't always be immediately answered," Mr Graham said.

Australian Bureau of Statistics data was also embedded in Call Tracker so that users could look into the demographic profile of callers.

"You could have an ad on 60 Minutes with a 1300 number and on Monday morning you can look at who called that number and their demographics, then compare those demographics to the national average," he said. "And you could tailor your media, advertising and creative to do even more with that."

Mr Graham said he was inspired by Google Analytics, the search engine's online research tool that enables people who buy its Adwords feature to track how many people have viewed the ad. "But in some ways it's now more sophisticated than Google Analytics because of the geographic footprints we use, which means we can go down to such small areas."

Jane Schulze while editor of The Australian Media liftout wrote this great piece regarding the launch of Jet Call Tracker.