Call details forwarding gives you additional attribution information about the calls driven by your call ads (call assets, call-only ads or calls on location assets) in real time. Calls can also be attributed back to the keyword and creative that drove the call.
Benefits
- Receive a unique Click ID for each call lasting longer than 15 seconds made to your call ads to better facilitate offline conversion reporting of call clicks.
- Additional real-time data, such as the ad group and campaign that triggered the call in order to enable enhanced call lead scoring and routing.
- Easy to use, simple to enable and manage.
Before you begin
Before you enable call details forwarding, you’ll need to make sure that account level call reporting is turned on.
In order to use call details forwarding, you’ll need to work with a supported third-party call analytics and tracking company. The following call analytics providers are available to integrate call details forwarding:
How call detail forwarding works
Call detail forwarding delivers additional information about your calls at the time that the call is received. Here’s what happens when your ad runs with call detail forwarding:
- A customer taps your ad to call you. You’re charged for a click – the same CPC as if the customer were clicking on an ad that goes to your website.
- Customers’ calls get routed through a Google forwarding number, which allows you to gather data about the call.
- Google makes a call to the business and connects the incoming call to the business. In addition to the caller ID that you’d typically receive from incoming phone calls, you’ll also receive additional information – like the campaign, ad group and click IDs – in the SIP headers of the call.
- You can use these headers to score leads in real time and support advanced call routing flows so that you can most efficiently route the call to the right agent and department. Using the GCLID provided with the call, your conversion data can be reported back to Google to help optimise your campaign using offline conversion import.
Role of call analytics providers in the call ads flow
If you enable call detail forwarding and use a supported call analytics provider, call ads using a number supplied by your call analytics provider will be directed to your call analytics provider.
When you're using one of these call analytics providers, you'll place the phone number provided to you by the call analytics provider directly into your call ads. When a user places a call to an ad using one of these phone numbers, the call analytics provider receives that call – along with click-level attribution data – and forwards the call along to you based on your call-forwarding configuration with the call analytics provider. If your call analytics provider supports integration with Google Ads, your conversion data can be reported back to Google to help optimise your campaign using offline conversion import.
Your data will only be shared with the call analytics providers that you procured your dynamic tracking number from. Call detail forwarding is only enabled on calls to ads that employ one of these tracking numbers: for example, if you used a number that wasn't supplied by your call analytics provider in one call ad and a number supplied by your call analytics provider in another call ad, call detail forwarding would only be enabled on the ad using the number supplied by your call analytics provider.
In other words, the call analytics provider will only receive information about calls made to ads which use the number supplied by the call analytics provider, not all calls made to the account.
How to enable call details forwarding
- In your Google Ads account, click the Admin icon
.
- Click Account settings.
- Click the Call reporting drop-down menu.
Note: Account level call reporting is required in order to enable call details forwarding. Disabling account level call reporting will disable call details forwarding. Assuming account level call reporting is enabled, call detail forwarding can be toggled on and off independently.
- Under 'Send real-time information about my calls', select On.
- Select your provider from the drop-down menu.
- Click Save.
Note: Before proceeding, a message about authorisation and responsibility around call detail forwarding data should appear. You must acknowledge this to enable call detail forwarding.
.