A tracking number is only useful if customers see it. On printed advertising that is straightforward — you print the tracking number instead of your own. On a website it is more delicate, because the same page is seen by visitors who arrived from paid advertising, from search, and from typing the address in directly, and you would like to tell them apart.
Number swapping is how that is done. The idea is that the website shows a tracking number in place of the tribe's own published number, chosen by how the visitor arrived, so a call from the website is distinguishable from a call from a sign on the door. The visitor sees an ordinary phone number and notices nothing.
First, check how your website behaves
Websites do not all treat these settings the same way. Yours will do one of these four things, and the rest of this guide describes the first:
- It follows the switches. It swaps a tribe's number only when both of the switches below are on, using the numbers on the tribe's Telephone Settings.
- It follows the switches, but only for URL Triggers. It shows a URL Trigger number when both switches are on and the address matches, and the Main Telephone Number otherwise. It never shows the Paid Number or the Organic Number.
- It never swaps. It always shows the Main Telephone Number, so the switches and tracking numbers make no difference to what visitors see.
- It swaps without checking the switches. Turning a switch off changes nothing on these websites. Some show the Paid Number and Organic Number, as some older websites do and as WordPress sites do with Dynamic Number Insertion turned on in the Gorilla Dash plugin. Others, on the tribe's page, show a URL Trigger number when the address matches and the Organic Number to every other visitor, and never show the Paid Number.
If you are not sure which of these applies to your website, ask Gorilla Dash support before relying on the switches. Separately, a call tracking provider's own script added to a website, for example through Google Tag Manager, can replace the number on the page whatever Gorilla Dash says, and the switches cannot stop it.
The two switches
On a website that follows them, swapping happens only when both of these are on, and both are on by default. So unless somebody has turned one off, a tribe that has tracking numbers filled in has them shown to its visitors.
| Switch | Where to find it | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Allow phone number swapping on websites | Calls, then Call Settings | The organisation-wide master switch. Off means no tribe swaps, whatever its own switch says. |
| Enable phone number swapping for this location | The tribe's Telephone Settings, under Website Number Swapping | Turns swapping on or off for that one tribe. Shown but not changeable while the master switch is off. |
The arrangement is deliberate. Head office keeps a single control that stops swapping everywhere at once if something goes wrong, and individual tribes can still opt out — which some will want to do if they are running their own tracking through a different system, or if they simply want their own number on their own page.
The numbers a website swaps in
The switches decide whether swapping is allowed. What is actually shown comes from three fields further down the same Telephone Settings screen. The website checks them in this order and uses the first one that applies:
- URL Triggers. A visitor whose web address carries one of the parameter and value pairs listed here sees that row's number. Use these for anything more specific than paid and organic, such as a single campaign. A URL Trigger is not remembered between visits, so a visitor who comes back later without the parameter sees the paid or organic number.
- Paid Number. A visitor who arrived from paid advertising sees this number, or the Organic Number if the Paid Number is empty.
- Organic Number. Every other visitor sees this number: people who came from an unpaid search result, and also people who typed the address in or followed a link that carries no advertising tag.
When the field a visitor would be shown is empty, they see the Main Telephone Number instead.
A website recognises a visitor from paid advertising by the tags in the address they arrived at. On websites of the first kind the exact list differs a little, but it always includes the gclid tag that Google Ads adds, utm_medium=cpc, utm_source=google, and any utm_campaign tag at all. Two results of those rules are easy to miss: a link in your own email newsletter that carries a utm_campaign tag shows the Paid Number, and so does a link from a tribe's Google Business Profile that is tagged utm_source=google. The website then remembers that browser as a paid visitor for a while, so later visits from it show the Paid Number too.
Each of the three fields has a magnifying-glass button beside it (Select from tribe numbers), which lists the tracking numbers already assigned to that tribe so you do not have to type one in. The Main Telephone Number at the top of the same screen is the number a visitor sees when none of the three applies, and it is the number used to attribute incoming calls to the tribe — so it is worth checking first if a tribe says the wrong number is showing anywhere at all. If your organisation has locked the main telephone number, only someone with a role in the organisation can change it. A tribe user who edits it sees a message saying the number is locked, and nothing on the screen is saved until the number is put back as it was.
Checking what a visitor sees
On a website of the first kind, you can look at both versions of a tribe's page yourself. Because the website remembers paid visitors, use a private (incognito) browser window for each check, and close every private window before the next one: private windows that are open at the same time share what the website remembers.
- Open a private browser window and go to the tribe's page on your website. This is what a visitor who did not come from an advertisement sees: the Organic Number, or the Main Telephone Number if the tribe has none.
- Close every private window, open a new one, and go to the same page with
?gclid=testadded to the end of the address (or&gclid=testif the address already contains a question mark). This is what a visitor from Google Ads sees: the Paid Number, or the Organic Number if the tribe has no Paid Number.
The number may change a moment after the page has finished loading, because the website works it out in the visitor's browser. A change you save in Gorilla Dash usually reaches the website within a few minutes, but a website that keeps its own copy of your data can take longer. A visitor who has been on the website before may also keep seeing the old number for some time, because the website remembers the tribe they last looked at.
Websites Gorilla Dash did not build
These settings are not limited to websites Gorilla Dash built. The tribe data feeds any site can read, including the WordPress one, carry the Paid Number, the Organic Number and a single yes-or-no answer to whether the tribe may swap, which is on only when both switches are on. A site built elsewhere can be made to honour them by whoever maintains it. The URL Triggers are not in those feeds; only websites that read the Gorilla Dash website API can use them. What Gorilla Dash provides is the record of what each tribe wants shown; acting on it is the website's job.
Either way the calls arrive in Gorilla Dash, because that depends on the tracking number being dialled rather than on which site displayed it.