Driving calls to your business is important. It's also important to follow these call tracking best practices so that you can improve your performance based on what’s working best.
Use call reporting to track calls from your ads
Call reporting provides you with details about the calls that you receive, down to the keyword level. By routing calls to your business through a dynamic, trackable phone number, you can get new reporting insights like call duration, call start and end time, caller area code and whether the call was connected. Most importantly, it allows you to track high value calls as conversions. All of this information will later become crucially important as you go about improving the performance of your call ads.
Tip
If you want to indicate to users that you’re a part of the local community, use a phone number with a local area code. If available, we’ll show your ad with local forwarding numbers that share the same area code or prefix number as your business; otherwise, a local number area code or prefix for your geographic region will be used instead. If a local number isn’t available, your call ad will show a toll-free number.
Track calls as conversions
Conversion tracking gives you important information that you can use to improve the performance of your account (with that info being available all the way down to the keyword level). There are multiple ways to track call conversions from the phone calls you drive: by setting the length of a call as an indication of value, or directly importing call conversions and revenue from your own offline call tracking information.
Imported call conversions is the most precise way to measure which calls lead to sales and other valuable customer actions. It lets you tell Google Ads when a phone call results in a sale or other conversion type by connecting the dots between your Google Ads performance and the different call outcomes you’re tracking in another system. For example, in addition to phone sales, an insurance advertiser might also track which calls result in a quote request or an upsell to another insurance line. By importing this information into Google Ads, you can learn which of your ads and keywords result in the most valuable mix of calls for your business.
If you aren’t able to import your call conversions and will rely on Google Ads to measure those conversions, you can instead set a threshold for the duration required to count as a conversion. Here are a couple of things to consider as you decide for yourself:
- Look through your call history to identify trends in call duration
- Ask your staff answering calls what the minimum duration of a high-quality call generally is
- Run a sample call yourself and time how long it takes to navigate call menus/greetings before saying something substantial to another person
Track website call conversions
Along with measuring the calls you receive from your ads, you can also set up website call conversions to measure when users call after visiting your website from an ad.
Some users need a bit more information than the results page can give them before they call. Regardless of whether someone calls you immediately or after a couple of days and a bit of research, measure all of the calls that you can.
Website call conversions let you measure the calls that originate from Google Ads for up to 60 days after the initial ad click happened. Tracking website call conversions helps you see how ads, your website and your phone calls work together through the customer journey. Your site can help pre-qualify customers, so that when users do call they’ll be that much more interested in what you have to offer.
Tip
Rely on your own systems to track website calls that come from non-Search ads.
Once you’re tracking your mobile calls as conversions, remember that other types of calls are counted in “All conversions.” Calls placed after manually dialing a phone number from ads on tablets and computers are included in the “All conversions” column. Those conversions can’t be used for automated bidding. As you review your performance from calls, look at the “All conversions” column instead of the standard conversions column to take into account all of the calls you’re driving, even from non-mobile devices.
Case study
DSL Extreme delivers high-speed internet to homes and businesses across the nation. They track call conversions across their ads and website to monitor call quality at the keyword level, and measure which calls result in engaged conversations with a sales agent. By analyzing these conversations, DSL Extreme determined the exact length of a call that typically results in a sale, information they use to further enhance the caller experience.
