Track your phone calls in online marketing

Do you know the feeling when your phone rings with a new potential customer? But you are unsure whether the call originates from your Google Ads campaigns, search engine optimisation, adverts on other websites or other online marketing sources.

Here, I will guide you on how to track your calls as conversions in Google Analytics.

The term you need to familiarise yourself with is call tracking, which has become increasingly popular in recent years. This is because businesses (and agencies) can now demonstrate an even greater effect of their online marketing through phone calls from potential customers.

How call tracking and phone call tracking work

Call tracking works by purchasing an external service from a provider, for which you pay a monthly fee. The cost depends on how many unique visitors your website receives each month.

There are several different call tracking agencies, but in Denmark I can highly recommend using Bellmetric, where you can get started with call tracking straight away. Bellmetric offers excellent customer service and continually develops and optimises their call tracking with new features.

It starts with a small piece of code

You begin by inserting a small piece of JavaScript on your website or webshop. This code ensures that each new visitor is shown a unique phone number, reserved for them for, for example, 10 minutes. You can decide the time period for which the unique number should be reserved for each visitor.

This means that when the visitor calls the unique phone number, they are redirected to your main number (or another number) – without the caller noticing any difference.

If the user saves the unique number and calls your business later, call forwarding can be set up for your phone numbers for up to 2 years.

The user has now made a call using this unique phone number, and the call is registered by Bellmetric, which collects data on the call using the small JavaScript placed on your website.

Track phone calls directly in Google Analytics

With support from Bellmetric and their JavaScript, we can track this phone call in, for example, Google Analytics, and therefore link the call to your online marketing activities. Naturally, you will need access to Google Analytics.

If you do not have Google Analytics, your call tracking provider will likely have a competent statistics module you can use. However, with Google Analytics, we can track ALL of our online marketing activities that generate phone calls.

Google Analytics is free and is Google’s very own analytics programme, used by millions of websites and webshops worldwide.

Setting up and tracking call tracking in Google Analytics

Once you have inserted your JavaScript code on the website, you need to set up a goal in Google Analytics. I will show you how easy it is to set up with Bellmetric in Google Analytics and have created a short video guide:

Opsætning af Calltracking i Google Ads

Efter at du har opsat Calltracking i Google Analytics, kan du f.eks. importere dine mål fra Google Analytics direkte ind i Google Ads og se dine opkald som konverteringer på søgeord og opkald. Her ser du hvordan du importerer dit mål fra Google Analytics, som jeg opsatte før i ovenstående video. Denne øvelse gør sig gældende for alle de mål du opsætter i Google Analytics.

You should not always pause online marketing

I have seen examples of online marketing being paused because a business did not receive, for example, sales, completed contact forms, or other completed goals on their website.

This is a reasonable decision from a goal-oriented online marketing perspective. However, what is often overlooked is that online marketing also generates a significant number of phone calls. Each month, I work with many clients focused on leads and turnover, and I often see that some online marketing campaigns only generate phone calls.

Example of call tracking with Google Ads

If you are familiar with Google Ads, let me give you an example of just how important call tracking can be for your Google Ads campaigns.

Google Ads is all about paying per click to your website on your chosen keywords and adverts.

I often see that with Google Ads campaigns for larger sales products, visitors tend to call first, then the customer receives a good offer, and the business subsequently sends a payment link or invoice by email.

This means that these sales are often tracked as “direct” sales in Google Analytics, and are not registered as sales from Google Ads. This is, of course, not ideal for your Google Ads campaigns, because if you do not track your calls, you miss out on registering conversions from your Google Ads campaigns.

Let us assume that we did not have call tracking for a client, and, for instance, DKK 500 was spent on a keyword/ad for advertising. As an agency, we would automatically pause that keyword, as no revenue or other measurable goals were being registered.

In this case, the client would lose future revenue from the same keyword, which could ultimately be highly valuable for the business and cost a significant amount on the bottom line if call tracking were not in place.

Now that we have Google Ads campaigns with call tracking, we can track whether we are receiving calls, sales, downloads, completed forms, or other goals on the website. This means we can now really accelerate online marketing that works and identify what does not.

Does it all sound a bit confusing? We can help you get started with call tracking and much more. Contact us here or call us on 71 99 34 74.