Introducing Website Call Conversion Tracking
Google have finally launched website call conversion tracking. Yay! For businesses that primarily rely on phone calls for leads or sales, this is a major breakthrough. Where previously AdWords advertisers would have to use third party software to track phone call sources, or rely on their staff to ask the caller, or just simply not know where the call leads came from, they’ll now be able to see exactly which ad and keyword the caller was sourced from. This will then allow for further AdWords optimisation to focus in on the keywords and ads that lead to most calls.
Maximise Call Value and Volume
Website owners can assign different values to callers depending on which page of the site the call originated from. For example, a physiotherapist may assign more value to calls from their ‘back pain’ page or ‘sports injury’ page and less value to their homepage.
Understanding which keywords are triggering phone calls and which are resulting in more valuable calls, means that you can optimize your keyword bids to drive more valuable calls. Using flexible bid strategies, you can factor in signals such as, location, device and time of day in order to make auction-time bid adjustments to help reach business goals.
For example, if you notice that your business receives more valuable phone calls during the late afternoon and from mobile devices, you can optimise your keyword bids so that your ads appear specifically for mobile users at that time of day, increasing the likelihood of conversions.
How Does Website Call Conversion Tracking Work?
Similar to regular conversion tracking, in that Google provides a snippet of code that is then added to your mobile or desktop website. Each time that your ad is clicked on a unique Google forwarding number is generated, this number will continue to display to that user for up to 90 days so that any future calls from that user can also be tracked.
How Do I Set Up Call Conversion Tracking?
Once you have an active call extension on your website, you will need to generate a new conversion tracking snippet in your AdWords account. To do this;
- Select Tools > Conversions > and click ‘+Conversion’ Button
- Enter ‘Conversion Name’. This can be the website page the call is most relevant to, for example ‘Sports Injuries’
- In the Source field select ‘Calls to a Google forwarding number on your site’
- Save and continue
- Enter a conversion value, For example, booking value (£) of a call from ‘sports injury’ page of the website
- Set the minimum call length that you want track as a conversion
- Save
- Select ‘Someone else makes changes to the code’ or ‘I make changes to the code’ depending on your situation
Unless you are tech savvy, we recommend selecting the first option and have the code snippets emailed to the person that edits your website. They can then apply the codes to the relevant pages on your site.
The first piece of code will be the conversion tracking code that we have just set up. The second code snippet, that is also added to each relevant page, is to replace your phone number with a Google forwarding number.
Once the code has been added to your site, you can test it by performing a search to bring up your ad, then click on that ad to visit your website (yes, Google will charge you for the click). Your regular phone number should now be replaced with a Google forwarding number.
You can edit the look and feel of these numbers so that they match your website design. Back in your AdWords account, you will now be able to measure phone calls made by the user who landed on the site after clicking on your AdWords ad.
Hi,
Can I implement the tracking snippet using Google Tag Manager?
Hi Stephen, Do you know if this call extension adword tracking is available to Irish ROI customers? It only list ‘UK’ in the google support article.
Thanks
Tim