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How To Setup Call Ads Conversion Tracking

How To Setup Call Ads Conversion Tracking
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Okay, I believe we are live, just give me a moment or two and I'm just gonna make sure everything is working fine...Okay. Think everything is working fine. Hello, Darren. Hope you are keeping well, and thank you for being here. If you can see me and hear me I'd appreciate it If you can put in a little yes, So I know everything is working fine and we'll get the show on the road.

I'll come back to your question, Darren, in a little while towards the end, let me cover the couple of things I'm going to go through today; and I usually take all these questions towards the end. All right. I think everything is working fine. Okay. Let's get started. Good morning. Good afternoon. And good evening, wherever you are logging in from the world.

My name is Uzair and thank you for joining in today's YouTube live stream. Every weekday I log in over here at five o'clock UK time to go through Google Ads, digital marketing, landing page, conversion tracking, email marketing, or anything to do with digital marketing, where you may be struggling or you want to learn and improve your knowledge, know-how, the expertise.

So this is the place where you can get all your questions answered. I'll try my best to answer them for you. These sessions are very informal, you can put in any questions you may have in the comment box on the right hand side, if you are here for the first time, or if you have been here before then, you know the drill I usually answer all the questions towards the end.

So in today's session, I'm going to go through the most requested questions, and the biggest problems, which I think a lot of Google Ads, users, and advertiser’s experience. Which is setting up the Google call ads tracking, and there seems to be a fair bit of confusion for a lot of people. So I thought I'll cover this topic for you.

And I've got a couple of other topics and things to go through as well. So as you may have heard this many times from me before that before you start any campaigns, you’ve got to set up your conversion tracking and make sure that it is working fine. Then what you need to do is once it's all set up, keep an eye on it and once your calls and your conversion start, then it should start to record in your Google Ads account.

So all you need to do for tracking up your call tracking is you go to tools and settings, and then you go to your conversions and from there you... Oh, this is my test account! So I already have got some in here. So ignore these for the time being and going into the plus, the blue button. You have a choice of four types of conversions over here - website, app, phone calls and import.

Import is where you can import data from Google Analytics or other third-party apps or programs. All we need to worry about is this one for today is the phone calls, click on that. You will get three different options. First, is the calls from ads using call extensions or call only ads? The other one is calls to a phone number on your website and clicks on your number on your mobile website.

Now the third one is only applicable if you’ve got a separate website for your mobile. So instead of www, you might have M dot your website.com or something like that. But usually this, the third option is hardly ever used these days, because it's the first two which you need to worry about. I want to start with the first one, calls from ads using call extensions, or call on the ads continue.

So the category is prefilled over here for a phone call lead, which you don't need to change it as such in here. So I'll keep it as a phone call. Now, what I tend to do is to have a naming convention for my conversions. So I can say calls from ads, and then I'll put my phone number in there.

So I know that this is my conversion, which I have set up right. Then you need to put in a value for each conversion. If you haven't worked it out, then you should, because you need to know how much a call is worth to your business. So I'm just going to put in hundred for the time being.

So the way you work this out is let's say you get 10 phone calls and you convert at a 30% ratio from calls into customers. And each customer is worth, let's say a hundred pounds. So I want three customers at a hundred pounds each. So that's 300. And then I divide that by 10, which is the number of leads.

So in that case, I would be putting in here 30. So put a number in here because then you can attribute how much your campaign is generating for your business or for your clients, right? Another conversion or confusion should I say is how many conversions to count, but click or interaction for a lead generation always have as one, because somebody may call you again, but it's the same person, whereas, for an ecommerce website or where you are selling physical or any other kinds of products, you put it on every page, because every sale is a different order and you need to attribute that value towards your Google Ads account.

So it says here recommended for purchases and recommended for lead signups and other conversions, right? So put this as one now call length to qualify the call as a conversion. It really depends on how you want to track whether you want to set it up as a 60-second call that will qualify as a conversion, or you could have it as a 20-second minimum call length.

So what this does is if somebody hangs up the phone after five seconds, because they may have accidentally clicked on your ad and come through, or you are not the one they are looking for, they hang up. I don't want this to be classified as a conversion. So the call length is whatever you want to keep it for your campaigns.

I tend to keep the click-through rate, click-through conversion window as 30, but it can go up to 90, I believe in the custom. Always include this in the conversion column, otherwise, it will not show up. So you need to put this, a little check, into this checkbox. Attribution model, everybody works differently. Google's default is the last click.

I tend to use a time decay because if multiple ads have shown to the same person and then they have converted, then every ad gets a little bit of attribution. What some customers or some clients before the first click. So for example, let's say a locksmith or a plumber where you only...someone only sees that ad only once.

And then you attribute that conversion to the first click and not to anything else, so you can, but the last click is the worst one in my humble opinion, so I never use that time decay. Now this conversion or the call tracking conversion tracking is the easiest one in the whole of the Google Ads account to set up, because once you've done this, that's it.

You don't need to even put up any tags or do anything in Google analytics or Google tag manager, that's it, it's done. It says you're done. All you need to do that is when you go into your campaign, you just select that conversion from that ad. So I'm going to go into one of these ads. Okay? So you put your country name in there from this dropdown list, phone number verification and final URL, and then conversion action.

You make sure that from the settings and the campaign settings, the call report is turned on. And then from here, you can see that this is the one which I had set up because usually Google's default one will be like something like this. So I want to set this up and now it's all set up, save it.

And you're pretty much good to go. And your call tracking will track your calls. I'm just going to have a look at the comment box. Good. There are a few comments and questions. I'll come onto that in a bit. Then the other one is calls from the website. So what happens when someone clicks on your ad and comes through to your landing page?

Now with call ads, they don't come through to the landing page. They click on that call button, the phone will start with, it will give them the prompt to dial out using your phone number. But when somebody clicks on your ad, actual ad and they come through to the website, then what Google is going to do is, it’s going to use a Google call forwarding number through to your website and it's going to track it.

And that's how you will find the calls from your website as well. The only thing you'll need to do is you'll need to set up that call tracking ideally through Google tag manager. Now... why is this taking so long to load up... Let's try and refresh it again! If anyone has any questions, please put it in the comment box and I'll answer them for you.

Keep in mind as a 30-second delay by the time you put it in, and I see it. So put them up sooner rather than later. Okay. Phone calls you see, go to plus button phone call, and now we're going to go calls to a phone number on your website. So the process is pretty much the same phone number, put in the name, value one call length, click through conversion window, including yes, attribution last click.

And then when you create and continue, we just gonna put in calls from the website... Okay, you'll get this option, three options and install the tag yourself, email the tag to your webmaster or the guys who look after your website. And then you click on this one, which is the Google tag manager for every kind of tracking.

I would highly recommend you use tag manager and you will get prompted to enter the conversion ID and the conversion level. And that's all you need to do. It's fairly straightforward. And there is a little conversion link, and tag in Google tag as well, which takes literally 10 seconds to set it up. And once these are set up, that's it.

You don't need to touch anything else. As long as the Google tag manager has not been removed from the website, your calls will keep on track. And when you go back, click done, and when you go to your ads, all you do is you select whichever conversion tracking phone number you want, and the same process applies again.

So that's how easy it is to set up your call tracking for all your calls. I've heard, and I've seen other agencies, advertisers, and users where they don't bother with the calls. They said, well, no, we are only tracking leads and form submissions from the website. Well, the phone call is one of the most important ways to get a lead and if you track it, you will find out how many leads and conversions you are getting just from your call ads.

Okay? So that's pretty much it for the call tracking, it's fairly straightforward and simple. I've simplified it as much as I possibly could. And there shouldn't be any confusion at all for you to able to just set them up, even if you are a newbie to Google Ads just follow this video and you'll be fine, unless you don't know how to set up Google tag manager, hire somebody or give us a call, we'll be able to help you out as well!

Obviously, there's a fee or a charge for the work done, but we can certainly do that for you! Another thing I wanted to share with you, something new, which has popped up, and I saw that on the Google Ads Help Center’s explanation... this was uploaded on the 2nd of June, and I thought, I'll show you what this is, understand changes in conversions with explanations when optimizing campaigns, it's important to understand why your conversion volume may change.

However, it can be difficult to diagnose this issue. So what it is showing you or telling you through this explanation...When you are comparing the data from a previous date range it's going to give you this option to view this explanation. So when you see that it's in beta at the moment, you can see what Google is giving you that explanation for that conversion change.

So the three things to keep in mind is, explanations are currently unavailable for manual CPC or ECPC search campaigns. Okay? So it was mostly smart. Smart campaigns are working on explanations that can compare two time periods of equal time length within the last 90 days. Okay? And explanations may only show for campaigns with significant performance changes. If you don't have much data in your campaigns it won't show up.

So what they mean by significant are your guess is as good as mine!!! So if you don't see it and you’ll probably know that you haven't got much data in your account and I believe once you have a bit more data it's going to show you this explanation. So I thought I'll cover this for you. Okay. Question times, let's go to the common box.

Hello everybody. I'll start from the top. Hi, Darren. ‘I'm from India, Google routing number from which we get calls gets disconnected. As soon as we pick up the customer call, what can be the reason? Is it country-specific or does it happen worldwide?’ Well, I'm in the UK and I've not come across this issue or this problem. You probably will need to speak with Google about this and see what may cause the issue.

So, unfortunately on this question, I am not going to be much of help other than ask you to get in touch with Google. But I believe they are, the support is closed at the moment, but as soon as they open up to speak with them and they'll try and get to the bottom of it. Inderdeep, ‘how do I avoid invalid clicks in display campaigns?’ Great question.

And this is where a lot of fraudulent clicks happen because of AdSense. What I do is I look at the quality of the traffic. If the bounce rate is very high and they bounce off the page after five seconds or something like that, I know that it's junk traffic. So what I do is I set up goals in Google Analytics, import them in Google Ads and then track it and see what happens.

So the things which I will track is time on site, for sure if they are staying on the website for a longer period of time if they have converted, if they have clicked on a video, number pages visited. So there's a number, there are a number of micro conversions. Should I say we set up and we track and that tells us and shows us the quality of the traffic and you can quite easily minimize.

And as soon as you see that these clicks are just getting the ads are just getting the clicks and you're not getting much out of it, then you know that these are fraudulent clicks as well. And also I would recommend shut out the mobile apps. You get a lot of traffic from there, and a lot of kids are playing these mobile apps and by accident, they click on it.

So you, your budget gets wasted as well. So I would recommend that you cut it out - the best way to do that is through the Google Ads editor. You can't stop it in the interface so you can minimize it. You can't, you can never make it zero, but you can cut out as much as you can.

Okay. Hello, Omar. ‘Can you give a brief on seeds list and what is the benefit of it and what is the performance plan importance and what does it do now?’ Seeds list. I'm not sure what you mean by that. So if you could send your question and rephrase it again that would be good... The performance planner is the projections as to what you can put in different numbers, see how your campaigns can potentially perform and work.

Okay. Hi, Si. ‘When I untick the search network partner impressions and clicks, it takes more than one week. Do you have any idea?’ So I would never run a search network partner network ad. I will only run it on Google and not on the search partners, first of all, because you will get a lot of traffic on there.

It shouldn't take more than a week... if it is, that means your bids are not very high, you need to keep upping up your bids. You are losing out in the auction. So the way to look at it is, look at your search impression, share, and your ad rank lost by search impression. So that way you can increase your bids slowly, slowly, and start to get them running.

Hi Adam, ‘If you are running a B2B campaign for a design agency, specializing in corporate accounts, should you omit mobile traffic and concentrate only on desktop and run them only during business hours?’ For sure. Yeah, absolutely. If you find or feel that your audience is just on the desktop, when they're at work, then you can omit them from the mobile and also run them during business hours.

But then quite often people do work in the evenings or late in the evenings, or they may have a late shift going on. So you never know. So what I would do is I would set up and see what's happening after five o'clock in the evening, if you're not getting any conversions, then you know that it's wasting the budget, but then people are searching for your product.

You will only get traffic. If there are searches being made, if nobody's searching, then you shouldn't get any clicks. So you might be missing out on something. So you could look into it, you know, run it, test it. And if it's not working, then stop it. ‘How do you deal with +44 numbers?’ I'm not sure what you mean by that. +44 is the country code for the UK.

So I'm really not sure what you mean by that. Okay. So send me any other questions you may have, and I'll answer them for you, but yeah, these sessions are held every weekday, five o'clock UK time. If you do have any problems running your campaigns, we also offer a full management service of your account and also do consulting and training as well.

Okay, Adam, what you are saying is, ‘What smart ads, and expanded text ads are a good mix for a local IT service, computer Repair Company.’ I believe IT services and computer repairs. You can't run them on search, so probably try and run it on the display network because the third party repair services Google has stopped it. So I'm not sure how you are able to run.

Let me know if you are running a campaign right now, I could be mistaken. It could be some other services you offer. Darren, ‘Does it make a difference if I'm using a mobile number or a toll free number?’ For your call ads, you don't need to use a toll free number. So mobile is fine. Yeah. Google will track it.

You see, whichever number you use, doesn't matter whether it's from call ads or from calls from your website, Google will absolutely track each and every call and provided you have started ads properly. Okay, cool. Brilliant. So thank you so much guys, for being with me. And I look forward to seeing you tomorrow. Same time at five o'clock UK time till then stay safe and well, I'll see you tomorrow.

Bye for now.

We’ve created this short article to help you learn all about Call Ads and how they could help your business. We’ve also included a handy step-by-step guide as to how to set up call ads conversion tracking, giving you a way of monitoring ad performance. 

Call ads are specifically designed to encourage people to call your business for a service or product, or perhaps to make a booking. Of course, call ads can only appear on devices that support making phone calls! If a potential customer clicks your ad, the button will make a call directly from their device. 

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Tracking Your Calls From Ads

You can use conversion tracking to help see the effectiveness of your call-only ads as well as call or location extensions that lead to phone calls to your business.

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This type of tracking treats a call as a conversion as long as it lasts longer than a minute. This is to ensure that any nuisance calls, those made by mistake and short calls that do not lead to a sale, are not included in the tracking.  

There are two main methods that you could use:

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  1. Track calls when they lead to sales or other types of conversion; in this case, you can create an import call conversion action. 
  2. Or you can choose to view all call actions leading to conversions via phone call conversion tracking.

Benefits Of Call Ads

Conversion tracking is a free tool that helps you to see and understand the effectiveness of your keywords, ads, ad groups, and campaigns,  enabling you to manage your budget more closely and boosting your overall ROI (return on investment). Actively running different types of conversion tracking gives you the added advantage of access to different automated bid strategies such as target cost-per-action (CPA) and target return on ad spend (ROAS), both of which are tools designed to automatically optimise your ad campaigns in-line with your business goals.

How To Set Up Conversion Tracking For Call Ads

To track phone calls from your ads you first need to ensure that you have a Google Ads account. You can sign up and create an account here: https://ads.google.com

You will need: 

  1. An active call extension, location extension with a call option, or call-only ad
  2. At least one call extension, location extension or call-only ad
  3. Make sure that your call reporting is enabled by checking in your account settings
  4. Check that your business is operating in an eligible country: https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/2454052#cfcountries

Step-By-Step Guide To Setting Call Ads Conversion Tracking

  • Start by signing into your Google Ads account
  • Go to tools;  under the ‘Measurement’ drop down click on ‘Conversions’
  • Click the blue plus (+) button
  • Click on ‘Phone calls’
  • Select either ‘Calls from ads using call extensions’ or choose ‘call-only ads’
  • Click Continue
  • Go to ‘Category’. Choose a description for your conversion action from the drop-down 
  • Under ‘Value’ enter in each phone call value or if you don’t want to you can select ‘Don’t assign a value’
  • Under ‘Count’. Select if you are going to count ‘one’ conversion per ad click or ‘every’. Every is considered to be best for sales calls, and One is best for lead generation. 
  • Select ‘Call length’. Here, type in the minimum required length of time in seconds that a phone call must last for it to be considered a conversion.
  • Click the ‘Conversion’ window. Select how long after an ad click you want to track conversions for.  The window can be between 1and 60 days.
  • Go to ‘Advanced’ and click Include in conversions. Selecting this will include data for this conversion action in your ‘Conversions’ reporting column. 
  • Click on ‘Attribution model’. This setting lets you choose how to assign credit for each conversion: either ‘last click’ or ‘first click’ that the customer made along the path of conversion. You can learn a lot more about that here: Attribution models
  • Finish with clicking Create and continue

This is a brief breakdown of the steps to set up. There are many other reports and items that can be tracked to help you get the most of your Google Ads and your web presence. 

If you’d like to learn more about how to use online marketing strategies such as Google Ads or YouTube video marketing, make sure you check our blog regularly at www.sfdigital.co.uk/blog.

Uzair Kharawala

Written by Uzair Kharawala

Partner at SF Digital Studios, a Google Premier Partner agency. Uzair has been helping businesses grow with Google Ads since 2002 and teaches it every week on YouTube.

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