Call tracking in Google Ads and other marketing channels.

If your business relies heavily on phone calls for sales rather than electronic enquiries then you probably need some kind of call tracking system. But implementing call tracking can be challenging and confusing to your customers. What’s the solution?

In order to measure the performance of your marketing you need data about where your inbound calls are coming from and which ones are generating the sales. If you are running advertising on other web sites (or offline ads e.g. posters & leaflets) a solution is to use a different phone number for each marketing channel.

There are many call counting and routing services around and they are relatively inexpensive. (e.g. http://www.tamartelecommunications.co.uk/) These services provide really great information about how many calls were made for a particular time period, whether those calls are answered and how quickly they were answered, how long calls were and for most callers the number of the caller too. Combining these statistics with knowledge of where you are spending your marketing budget will allow you to focus your budget and energies on the marketing channels that deliver the best performance.

If you are worried about people being put off by non-local numbers (e.g. 0800, 0333 etc) you can easily purchase local numbers for your area.

One of the pitfalls of this approach is that if you use this method over a longer period your customers can get confused about which number they should be calling you on. So for example the number they first called you on (from an ad) might be different to your main switchboard number. Also your statistics can be skewed by calls from existing customers on tracking phone numbers.

The solution is to develop a clear strategy about how many numbers you are going to use and how they will be managed over the longer term. This varies from business to business depending on the number of advertising channels and call volumes in general.

When it comes to tracking the performance of calls from Google Ads things can get trickier due to the technical challenges. Google do provide some solutions to call conversion tracking but knowing which calls converted to a sale is not easily tracked. Any information you can get from call tracking, even simple call counting, can be used to make adjustments to your campaigns.

With mobile phones now being the dominant use of the web, phone call tracking systems are becoming more and more popular as it’s often much easier for customers to call directly from their phone than fill out a form on their phone.

​Do you want help with call tracking and improving the performance of your Google Ads campaigns? Get in touch today.