Call tracking for Birmingham ads

Most Birmingham service businesses are hired over the phone, so an account that cannot see calls is optimising for the wrong thing. Call tracking is three mechanisms, all inside Google Ads and free: a call asset that puts a tap-to-call button on the ad, a forwarding number that swaps onto your website for visitors who arrived from an ad, and call-only ads that have no landing page at all. Each reports the call with its duration, the hour and the search that produced it. The one decision that matters is the duration threshold: a call under about a minute is a misdial or a wrong number, and counting it teaches the bidding to buy more of them.

Three mechanisms, and when each is used

How the forwarding number works

Google issues a forwarding number, with a UK area or mobile prefix, that routes to your real number. On the ad the call asset uses it directly. On the website a small script replaces your displayed number with the forwarding number for visitors who arrived from an ad, and only for them; everyone else sees your normal number. When the call comes in, Google records that a visitor from a particular search, on a particular keyword, in a particular campaign, rang, and for how long. Your phone rings as normal and the caller sees nothing different. The number can be set to show your real number as the caller ID or the forwarding number, and the recording of calls is off by default and stays off unless you want it and tell callers.

The duration threshold

Google lets you set the minimum length of a call before it counts as a conversion. Leave it at the default of a few seconds and every misdial, every wrong number and every caller who hung up on hold is a conversion, and Smart Bidding will bid for more of them because it cannot tell the difference. Set it to about sixty seconds and the count is calls where a conversation happened. For a solicitor or a B2B firm, where the first call is longer, ninety seconds is safer. The threshold is the difference between an account that thinks it is converting and one that is.

What the calls-by-hour report changes

Once calls are counted properly, the report of calls by hour of day and day of week is the most useful thing in the account for a Birmingham trade. It shows when the phone actually rings from ads and, against the ad schedule, when the ads were running to voicemail. A boiler engineer who sees that half the calls come between 6pm and 9pm and that nothing after 10pm is answered has the ad schedule written for him: bid up in the evening, off overnight. A restaurant sees the function enquiries coming at lunchtime from people at their desks and the table bookings at six. The schedule is corrected from this report monthly rather than guessed once.

Calls and the landing page

On a phone the number is the form. It goes at the top of the page as a tap-to-call link, with the hours it is answered beside it and, for an emergency trade, the call-out fee, so the caller already knows. The form below it is for the planned jobs and the people who prefer to type. A page that puts the number at the bottom, or shows it as an image, or hides it behind a contact page, has just made the call tracking irrelevant because nobody will ring.

The monthly question

Call tracking counts conversations. It does not know which conversations became jobs. So at month end the report asks: of the calls over a minute, which became customers, and roughly what were they worth? That answer, imported back into the account as an offline conversion or simply written into the report, is what turns cost per call into cost per customer. For a Birmingham plumber it takes five minutes with the diary open, and it is the number the account should be judged on.

Three settings to check tonight in any account that lives on calls: is there a call asset on every campaign; is the conversion action for calls set to a minimum length of about a minute; and does the landing page show the number as a tap-to-call link in the first screen on a phone. If any is a no, the account is buying calls it cannot see or counting calls that never happened.

Third-party call tracking, and when it is worth paying for

Google's own tracking is free and covers ads. Paid call tracking services add numbers for other channels, so calls from the Google Business Profile, from directories and from print can be compared with the ads, and some add recording and transcription. For a single-branch Birmingham business advertising only on Google, the free tracking is enough and the paid service is a monthly cost with no extra decision behind it. For a firm comparing five channels it earns its fee. The report should say which applies.