One thing that many forms of online advertising have over their tertiary counterparts is better metrics. In a word, you can often track the effectiveness of an online ad by (1) its click-through-rate, and (2) whether that click converts. For advertisers that run banner ads for publicity or branding purposes, however, some of these metrics are lost. After all, both the landing page for the ad may not a point of sale, nor may there be a point of sale anywhere on the site of the landing page.

Well, a company called ClearSaleing is now claiming that they can track how such online ads ads convert offline. The only catches, however, are that (1) the offline conversion has to involve a phone call, and (2) they're not willing to tell you how it works unless you're willing to entertain a sales call on their part. As the press release explains:

Columbus, OH (PRWEB) November 15, 2007 -- Search engine marketing technology developer, ClearSaleing Inc., has announced the release of Version 3.3 of its software. Search engine marketers will use this enhanced version to provide phone trackin

[...] Research suggests that for every one online contact form or registration an advertiser receives, an advertiser will receive three to five additional sales phone calls.

ClearSaleing's phone tracking solution removes conversion tracking loss by relating phone orders back to the original online advertising source. Online advertisers may accurately value each ad's true profit contribution and return.

[...] Search engine marketers need only to install the ClearSaleing tracking code on their Web site to track and properly value each online ad's contribution to sales that are consummated offline.

In other words, there's no mention of how this technology can track how online advertising converts offline aside from that the landing page for that ad needs to have a script on it. How a script on a web page could track a phone call, however, is something that seems only within grasp of the imagination of Gene Roddenberry or Isaac Asimov.

Indeed, even ClearSaleing seems to have trouble explaining. While there is no elucidation to be found anywhere in the press release, the landing page for the words "phone tracking solution" in that press release lead to nothing more than a contact form -- below which appears a list of all their other services. In fact, it might argued that ClearSaleing is simply trying to generate leads for their sales department to push all those other services.