What is Google Ads Call Tracking? A Guide to Google Ads Call Tracking

Phone calls are a valuable source of conversions for many lead-generation businesses, so it’s essential to be able to track these events to help measure the impact advertising has. Google Ads (formerly Google AdWords) call tracking is a type of conversion tracking that allows you to measure the impact Google Ads has on phone calls to the advertised business. This will enable you to view what campaigns, ad groups, keywords, ads etc. are driving call conversions and optimise your activity to these events.

Even non-lead generation advertisers can benefit from call tracking to help better understand how paid search users interact with the company.

The sources of the calls

There are two main sources for calls tracked by Google Ads – calls from ads and calls from the website.

Calls from ads

These are calls driven by users through a call only ad or a call extension. These conversions are the easiest to set up, as they are done directly within Google and don’t require any javascript or tracking knowledge.

Call from ads conversions can come from two areas within Google Ads:

Call Extensions

Call extensions are added to regular search ads displayed with either a Google forwarding number to call or a clickable number to call on mobile.

Call Only Ads

Call-only ads are ads designed solely for the purpose of driving phone calls. Whereas ads using call extensions will also have a link to a website, call ads only action will be calling the phone number advertised.

Calls from the Website

Calls from the website can be tracked using a Google forwarding number.

This works by Google using a unique number for that period of time, associated with the Google click ID (GCLID) to identify if someone that came through that specific click calls the business. This works by dynamically replacing your business phone number on your website with a unique phone number that then forwards the call to the number being replaced. This works by adding javascript code provided by Google Ads to switch the number on your website with a Google forwarding number.

Configuring Website Phone Call Conversions

Phone call conversions in Google Ads can be configured with different settings.

Action Optimisation

The action optimisation can be configured as either primary or secondary for bidding optimisation. If it is set to primary it will be used as a conversion event for bid strategies to optimise towards. If your business objective is to drive phone calls/leads and this is a valuable touchpoint for you, it would be recommended to set this to primary. However, if this is being tracked more for the purpose of seeing how users interact with the website, it could be better suited on secondary.

Value

If you have a value you can assign for a phone call it can help when using a conversion value/ROAS based bidding strategies optimise towards more valuable conversion actions (assuming you have multiple).

For example, if your business has 100 phone calls and the total value generated from these 100 calls is £5,000, you know the average value of a phone call is £5,000/100 = £50.

Otherwise, we would recommend not assigning any value to the phone call conversions tracked.

Count

You can set it to count either “one” or “every” phone call conversion per click. Typically for lead generation, you would only want to count one phone call as a conversion to avoid double counting the leads generated.

Phone Numbers

There are two numbers that need to be set when creating phone call conversions. The display number and the destination number.

The display number should match exactly how your current phone number is shown on your website and is the number that will be replaced.

The destination number is the phone number you want to receive the call and where the call from the Google number will be forwarded to.

Call Length

The call length can be used to filter out phone calls under a certain length not counting them as conversions. This can be useful if you know that phone calls that are relevant and valuable are typically over “x” number of seconds. This can vary quite a lot by industry, but a value of 20 – 30 seconds for example, may be used to filter out irrelevant calls.

Click-Through Conversion Window

The conversion window for calls on the website can be set anywhere from 1 day to 60 days. The optimal window may vary from business to business. It is recommended you view the time to conversion report to see how long the typical conversion length takes for your website from ad interaction to conversion. It is usually safer to start off with a longer conversion window such as 60 days analyse the data and reduce the window if required later.

Attribution Model

Assuming you have enough data for this, it is recommended to use data-driven attribution. Data-driven attribution uses your conversion data to calculate a particular ad interaction’s contribution to a conversion across the conversion path. Otherwise, a more traditional model such as last-click could be used as an alternative.

Local vs Non-Local Numbers

Both local and freephone or non-local numbers are available depending on the area for Google Ads call tracking. Please see Google’s documentation for a list of countries call tracking is available in, it also which countries have local and freephone numbers available.

For example, in London, United Kingdom a local number might start “020”, which relates to the area the phone number is from, whereas a freephone number might start “0800”, which isn’t area specific.

Google Call Tracking Uses “Dirty” Phone Numbers?

One criticism of Google’s forwarding numbers is that the numbers are “dirty”. When people say this, they are referring to the fact that the numbers aren’t unique to the website they are displayed on and may have previously been displayed on a different website.

For example, imagine someone clicks through a Google ad calls the website and saves the number on their phone. Then again, decides to call the same number a few months later. That number is no longer allocated to that website and user and is currently being used to forward numbers for a completely different site. This would then forward that user to an unexpected phone number and company.

Whilst this is an edge case to the typical journey that lead generation providers have for users, it is something that does happen and you can occasionally come across. Using a third-party call tracking solution can provide dedicated numbers for your website so this isn’t a problem, along with other benefits.

Does Google Call Tracking Cost Money?

Google call tracking is a free solution and doesn’t cost the advertiser extra for using. If someone calls a Google forwarding number on your website, the cost is no extra than the click paid to get the user from Google Ads to your site. However, if someone clicks on a Google number shown in your Google Ad, that is treated the same as a regular click to your site would cost.

Limitations of Google Call Tracking

Whilst Google call tracking is a great solution considering it is offered for free by the Google Ads platform, some limitations make it inferior to using a third-party call tracking provider. However, it depends on the business whether the cost of using a call tracking provider will be worth the investment for their situation.

Some of the limitations are:

• Google call tracking only works with Google Ads traffic. You would need to use a third party to track calls from other marketing channels
• Google call tracking only works in certain countries
• Google call tracking uses “dirty numbers”
• Google call tracking has limited traceability on the outcomes and value generated by phone calls.
  • This is one of the prime benefits of a third-party call tracking solution for lead generation websites with phone calls making up a reasonable portion of leads. Other solutions can facilitate the ability to track whether a phone call is qualified, converted or even a value for a lead driven by the phone call at the point of the call or in the future e.g. 2 weeks after the call. This can then be used to pass one of these events back to Google Ads through their conversions API tracking the conversion against the GCLID. This can be incredibly valuable to enable you to analyse and optimise your marketing activity based on the value driven by it.
• If you have multiple different phone numbers on the same webpage you want to track, Google Ads call tracking may not work for you.

How to Install Google Ads Call Tracking On A Website

Google Ads call tracking is relatively straight forwarding to install on your website. To learn how to do this, please check out our guide on setting up Google Ads website call tracking with Google Tag Manager.