3 Ways to track phone calls generated via Google Properties

Often when we track results via digital marketing, we tend to track website traffic along with goals (transactions or leads generated). One element we have seen many bushinesses miss out on is tracking how many phone calls were generated via the online medium. If you do not track and calculate the calls generated, it is a significant number of leads that are missed out or rather not counted into the digital metrics.

The power of pushing a phone number on your landing page, social page, or website is dynamic. Depending on the nature of the business and the product/service type, placing a phone number makes it easier for a customer to engage with your business. Call tracking via Google Analytics, Google AdWords & Google Plus allows you to monitor which visitors from your website, social ads, and other digital promotions who have conversed with you via phone. While the three methods do not encompass or track all calls but its a huge step from not tracking the calls.

So lets look at each of these tracking methods in a bit more detail. Once you have implemented all these three methods, you can add these numbers to your existing results metrics to understand the true impact of your digital marketing efforts.

On Google Analytics
When users click your phone number (on a mobile device) to call your business, Google Analytics is able to track these via what they call "Event Tracking". Events in this scenario could mean phone calls or even downloads, video plays etc. Configuring the Google Analytics event tracking code while easy, requires some technical know how. So do involve your technology or web team to help you get this done. This google analytics event tracking code is used to record a user’s interaction with the website elements and in this use case we tracking the number of people who clicked on the phone number to call the business.

Example:

Specifications to call the _trackEvent() method in the UI element of a page:

1. category (mandatory field) - The common name given for the phone numbers you want to track.

2. action (mandatory field) - A string that is uniquely paired with each category, to define the type of user interaction for the web object.

3. label (optional field) - An optional string to provide additional dimensions to the event data.

4. value (optional field) - An integer that you can use to provide numerical data about the user event.

5. non-interaction (optional field) - A boolean that when set to true, indicates that the event hit will not be used in bounce-rate calculation.

As a result, all user activity on the on-site contact numbers provided is calculated and displayed as Events in Google Analytics (under the Behaviour tab)

On Google AdWords
Customers can call your business after clicking on a Google ad and learning about the products and services that you offer on your website. The AdWords click-to-call ads help you connect with these customers. These ads encourage calls to your business by showing the phone number on the ad. On smartphones and other high-end mobile devices, these phone numbers are often clickable and cost the same as a standard CPC would demand.

Click-to-call ads also help you to gain insights about the calls. These stats help you understand which keywords and ads are driving the most phone calls, which results in the optimization of these ads to make the graphs better. To activate these you will need to go to the Ad Extensions Tab.

On Google+
Google+ provides the easiest steps towards gauging the call metrics. One has to simply make sure that his/her business page furnishes all contact coordinates clearly. Furnishing all information makes your contacts visible in the search engine, where customers are given the power to call your business by a single touch of the button.

The metrics towards these calls can be viewed in the 'Insight' tab of you the business's Google+ page.

Learn more about Event Tracking – Web tracking & click-to-call ads to unlock the potential of your landing page or website, to monitor the amount of audience who convert through calls.