How To Track Phone Call Leads From AdWords & Optimise Your Campaign For Higher ROI

0 Comments

When running an AdWords campaign, most small businesses miss out on one really important aspect.

Tracking the leads that enquire via the telephone.

Yes, AdWords makes it really easy to measure leads and sales generated online using Conversion Tracking &/or goal tracking in the Google Analytics tool.

But, how do you know when a lead from your campaign came via a phone call?

Even worse, how do you know which keyword, ad, landing page and so forth generated a phone call?

Lastly, how do you track telephone leads that actually turned into paying clients?

When I ask these questions of most people, the usual answer is “I ask them how they found us”…

And that’s fine, EXCEPT (from my experience) most people asked that question will answer something like “the internet” or if you’re really lucky, they might say “Google.”

However, 99.9% of them will not even realise they clicked on one of your ads (thinking instead it was an organic listing), let alone remember what keywords they typed and what the ad said.

So, you’re stuck if you are trying to accurately measure what portion of your AdWords campaign generated phone leads.

Until a few years ago, that is…

You see, back in approx 2009 (at least here in Australia), I ran across a website for a service which offered phone call tracking services that integrated with your AdWords and Google Analytics.

It could record the call (great for post-call analysis of what went right or wrong, etc.), it could tell you which keyword typed into Google showed an ad that generated the phone call, and it could tell you the phone number of the caller and the length of the call, etc.

Now, you might say “So What? What does it matter that I can track all this stuff.”

Well, perhaps the most important reason for tracking this information is so you can optimise the results of your AdWords advertising for improved ROI.

You see, when you get a conversion using online systems (like a webform or shopping cart), you can track a conversion fairly easily. However, unless you are using something like phone call tracking, you won’t know which keywords got the calls, and when you can’t measure something accurately, you can’t improve it.

Even worse, you might accidentally delete or pause one or more keywords that are generating lots of phone call enquiries.

Without any call tracking in place, you wouldn’t know what you had just done. Just that your enquiries have started going down and you are losing sales.

Also, when you can’t track the phone calls generated by AdWords, you also might not realise that enquiries coming in via phone are (as an example) two times as profitable/successful as those coming by an enquiry webform (or vice versa). That knowledge could mean the difference between breaking even and making a profit for some businesses.

So, if your business relies on inbound phone calls for sales, you should definitely be looking into getting Call tracking integrated with your AdWords campaign. You won’t regret it AND if you actually take the time to measure and track the results, and optimise your campaign, it will pay for itself very quickly and produce a positive ROI in time.

Sample Google Analytics Screen Shot of phone call tracking

There are 3 different companies offering this service in Australia that I am aware of. They are: Jet Interactive, Avanser & Delacon. I have used – and had good results from – the first 2 but not used the latter.

For AdWords advertisers outside of Australia, there are plenty of service providers who offer this sort of service. Try doing a Google search for ‘google adwords call tracking’ or similar and you should find plenty of local providers to consider.

About the author 

Eran Malloch

{"email":"Email address invalid","url":"Website address invalid","required":"Required field missing"}
Subscribe to get the latest updates