Imagine you’re running multiple Google Ads campaigns. One campaign brings in a flood of calls, leading to conversions and new customers, while the other generates some clicks but no calls. How do you tell one from the other, and how do you avoid spending your precious Google Ads budget on the latter? 800.com’s Google Ads Call Tracking makes life easier.
Identifying the difference is crucial when optimizing Google Ads spend and investing in what drives results for your business. You must know which ads, keywords, and campaigns lead to phone calls and offline conversions.
When you don’t, it’s near-impossible to distinguish between a high-performing campaign and one that’s just draining your budget.
That’s why tracking phone calls from your Google Ads is vital.
Ready to improve your Google Ads campaigns and get more out of your ad spend? Learn more about 800.com’s call tracking features—or schedule a demo—today.
Can you track phone calls from Google Ads?
The simple answer is: yes.
Tracking calls from Google Ads enables you to collect valuable data on the campaigns that drive direct engagement, allowing you to streamline your advertising efforts—and budget—for better results.
There are two main ways to track phone calls from Google Ads:
- Directly within Google Ads, using Google’s own built-in features.
- Using an advanced call tracking solution (like 800.com) for more comprehensive and integrated data and insights.
Call tracking with Google Ads
Google offers a straightforward way to start tracking calls, which can be broken down into two main types:
- Calls from ads: when a user clicks on a call button in your ad (or anywhere on a call-only ad) and dials your business directly from the search engine results page.
- Calls to a phone number on your website: when a user clicks your ad, lands on your website, and then calls a number listed there.
This basic tracking provides data like call counts, duration, and area codes, giving you a baseline for which ads, ad groups, campaigns, and keywords directly generate phone calls.
Tracking business calls in Google Ads
Setting up Google’s native call tracking involves a few key steps:
- Enable call reporting from within your Google Ads account settings.
- Create call assets (extensions) to add a phone number to your campaigns.
- Set up website call tracking by creating a conversion action in Google Ads (here’s the full how-to from Google).
The problem(s) with Google Ads call tracking
While Google’s built-in features are a good starting point, there are some significant limitations for businesses that rely heavily on phone leads:
- Limited scope: Google’s native tracking is primarily focused on calls that happen directly from an ad or immediately after a click—it can have difficulty capturing the full customer journey, including calls that occur later or after a customer interacts with your brand via multiple touchpoints.
- Basic data: Although it tracks the number and duration of calls, Google Ads often lacks deeper insights, like multi-channel attribution (for example, if other channels influenced the caller before they clicked the ad).
- Siloed call data: Google Ads effectively tracks calls driven by Google Ads, but it doesn’t allow you to measure that PPC call data against calls coming from other sources, like SEO, social media, or email marketing.
Tracking phone calls from Google Ads with 800.com
When you need to fill the gaps left by Google’s native call tracking, a dedicated call tracking solution (like 800.com) can help. Our advanced call tracking offers a more powerful and holistic approach, with the detailed data you need to fully understand performance across channels.
With 800.com call tracking, you get:
- Real-time call analytics dashboard: Immediate access to comprehensive call data, visualized clearly, helps you identify trends in caller locations, peak call times, answered vs. missed calls, and more.
- Multi-channel call attribution: Attribute calls even when the caller has interacted with your brand via multiple channels before making a call. If someone sees a Facebook ad, later searches on Google, and then calls, for example, you can see the entire journey that led to that phone call and give proper credit to each touchpoint.
- Dynamic number insertion (DNI): Easily track calls from website visits based on the sources, keywords, and campaigns that lead customers to your site.
- Call recording & transcription: Review recorded calls for quality assurance, team training, and to analyze frequent keywords and customer sentiment.
- AI sentiment & outcome analysis: Move beyond basic metrics to better understand the caller’s overall vibe and if the call likely led to a conversion.
- Better, data-driven decisions: Analyzing Google Ads call data alongside metrics from other marketing channels (like SEO, social media, email, and even direct mail) means you get a more complete, holistic view of your marketing performance—empowering you to make smarter, more effective budget decisions.
Note: learn how to set up call tracking with Google Ads and 800.com—if you need help connecting Google Ads to 800.com, our support team is ready to help.
Get more out of your Google Ads with 800.com
Google Ads offers a decent starting point for call tracking—but the limitations of using Google Ads call tracking alone can leave you with an incomplete and siloed view of your marketing performance.
To better understand the whole customer journey and optimize your return on ad spend (ROAS), you’re better off with a dedicated call tracking solution like 800.com.
With detailed, multi-channel attribution, advanced analytics, and a seamless Google Ads integration, our call tracking platform offers the clarity you need to make better, more data-driven decisions about your business.
Ready to improve your Google Ads campaigns and get more out of your ad spend? Learn more about 800.com’s call tracking features—or schedule a demo—today.