Track Phone Calls on Google Ads
When someone clicks on your Google Ad and arrives at your website the next action they take may be to pick up their phone and call you. This action is valuable and it indicates that your Google ad paid off. It may or may not result in a sale, but it’s the best a Google ad can do for you. The rest is up to you to make the sale.
What’s that phone call worth? Let’s say you get one sale from every 10 phone calls. That one sale is worth $1000. So on average each phone call is worth $100.
If you spend $200 on Google ads and the result is 10 phone calls you’ve made a profit of $800 ($1000 – $200). Next you can scale up. Spend $400 to get 20 phone calls and you get a profit of $1600 ($2000 – $400).
Here’s the big question. How do you know which phone calls were a result of a person seeing and clicking your Google ad?
That’s where phone call tracking comes in.
Within the Google ads system you can set up phone call tracking.
There are two types of phone calls. One is calls directly from the ad itself. This is where the phone number shows directly on the ad so the viewer simply makes the call from the ad and never visits your website. The second type is when they click on the ad to arrive at your website, then make the phone call using the phone number on the website itself. In fact the website visitor may click on your ad one day, then several days later may return to your website, see the phone number, and make the call. This will still be credited as a result of the Google ad and recorded as a phone call in your Google ads account.
It’s very important to track phone calls so you can know if your Google ads are working or not. Getting clicks and good click through rates are one thing, but the real measure of success is the lead or sale.
Setting up phone call tracking is pretty easy for the “calls from ads” type. But a little trickier with the “calls from website” type.
I found a good guide on another website that explains it well. The easiest way is using GTM (Google Tags Manager) which is outlined below. Here’s the website with more explanation: https://www.nichemarket.co.za/blog/nichemarket-advice/track-calls-gtm-google-ads
Tracking on-site calls with GTM
If you’re like me and prefer a more straightforward way of doing things as I do, then I suggest you opt for the Google Tag Manager implementation.
- Head over to GTM
- Create a new tag.
- Give your tag a name IE – “On-site call tracking.”
- Select Google Ad calls from website conversion.
- Add your Phone number
- Add your conversion ID provided by your Google Ads account
- Add your conversion label provided by your Google Ads account
- Now to add your trigger. Depending on your site you can set it to fire on pages that have your phone number of it is in the footer or header, I would suggest firing it to all pages to be safe.
- Save and submit, and you’re ready to go.