Google Ads Phone Call Conversion Tracking Using Google Tag Manager Tutorial

Key Takeaways

What's up everyone? Today I'm going to be going over how to track Google Ads phone calls. So, this is without using any other tools outside of Google Tag Manager and using that to actually track the calls that go through your website that came from a Google Ads click. Now, this isn't a perfect system and there are people that might go to your website and then they may end up calling you directly from your Google business profile and there's a lot of calls that you can potentially miss in terms of where the person actually originated from. So, if you're looking for more of that data and you're looking for, okay, when did this person actually first visit my website, and where is the actual source of their call, what's their first click, what's their last click. So, you can kind of find some of that stuff in Google Ads, but if you're looking for all of that data and all the information about all of your phone calls, Call Rail is really what you would want to set up starting at $50 a month. There's other options out there. There's what converts, there's call tracking metrics. My video is going to show you how to do this without using Call Rail, but these tools are out there. They exist. They're very easy to set up. They have guides, you know, from start to finish. Basically, getting getting it installed on your website. So, let's track phone calls. Basically, the three different phone calls that we can track into Google Ads for cory's turf.com, my fake my fake turf installation business. So, if we come over here to Google Ads to get started, kind of the the very first thing is you need your Google Ads account. You have your website. I highly recommend creating a call button that looks exactly like mine. So, it doesn't have to be the same color, but make sure it lists your phone number just like this. And basically, just choose a format for your phone number. It could be 843-55 hyphen, but choose a format and keep it consistent throughout the entire website. That's a really important factor. And always make sure your phone number is linked. Like this one's actually not linked. I just checked before the before this video, but this one's not linked, but you always want to make sure it's linked so you could actually track those phone calls. If it's not linked, you really it's hard to track. So coming back over here to the homepage, basically my first step in WordPress in any website platform you're using is you need to install Google Tag Manager. Before you install Google Tag Manager, you need to create a Google Tag Manager account. Very easy. tag Manager.google.com. Create an account for your website. It's you're going to come to a page that basically looks like this. So once you're done creating it, it's going to say install Google Tag Manager. So you're going to have two pieces of code you need to place on your website. So if we come over here to my back end of my WordPress website. So you can see over here in plugins, my favorite plugin to do this is WP code. So if we go over to the actual plugins page and we look at our WP code light here. So this is the one that I like to use. If you go in the plugins, add plugin, WP code, it just looks just like this. Uh so this is the one that you want to install. Go to add plugin, search it there. kind of my favorite plugin to add pixels for Google Tag Manager. They make it really easy because you can go right here. It's on the lefth hand side. It's going to say code snippets, but this is your WP code plugin. Kind of confusing because there is a code snippets plugin, but WP code plugin, find codes snippets on the left, header and footer. So, this is where your Google tag manager pixel is going to be installed. So WordPress website, go to the back end, install the WP code plugin. Looks just like this, the logo. And then create a Google Tag Manager account. And once you create your Tag Manager account, it's going to look just like this. So copy this piece of code. Paste it right here in the header. You can see mine right there. Copy this piece of code. Place it right here in the footer. You can see that one right there. And save changes. Okay. So we have our two pieces of code there. The next thing that we want to do is actually set up our conversions. So, you actually want to make sure that you set up your buttons and link them correctly. If we go over here real quick, we'll just go to my homepage. So, this is an Elementor website. It could be any type of website. You could use, you know, the block editor through WordPress. There's a lot of different website platforms people use now. So, any of these you can do this with. It's just creating a button and linking that button. So, if we scroll down, here is my button. It's probably not even Okay, this one is linked. So, teel goes to my fake phone number. You can see the call text right there. And then I just have a little icon added here for for an element button. So when people click on this, basically what's going to happen on their phone is it's going to prompt bring up the call screen and prompt them to call that number. So basically this is a conversion that doesn't actually track the phone call while the others do. This is tracking a button click. So you always need to keep that in mind with the mobile calls because you could theoretically have them be over reported. And there's things you could do to kind of make sure that your mobile calls are a little bit better. So I'll show you a few ideas that I've done in the past. So, coming back over here to our homepage. I think we are ready to just set up our conversions. So, we're going to come over here to Google to our goals. Go to summary. And then we're going to scroll down here a little bit. I actually already have these set up in the account. So, calls from ads, desktop phone calls, mobile clicks a call. That's what I call them. You can name them whatever you want. Calls from ads are calls directly from your advertisements. People never get to your website. Desktop phone calls. So, that does not require Google Tag Manager. This is just set up in your Google Ads account. Desktop phone calls. I call them that basically you're on a non-mobile device and you take out your mobile device to call the number that is listed on the page when you access this specific page. So after a Google ads click this number is actually going to look different and basically when people call that number that that call is tracked. Mobile clicks to call is a little bit different than desktop phone calls. And basically people coming onto the website with their mobile phone they see a call button they're like I want to call this business right now. What's become very popular is people instead of doing this will actually just search the business name Corey's turf because we're constantly kind of like researching looking reviews all these things. Cory's turf basically see okay what do the review score look like where are they located any additional information I can get from the Google business profile and they may call directly from that business profile. So you do want to link your Google business profile to your Google ads account. So you could do that directly through the assets page going to location if we could find it and then clicking on the plus sign and you'll see our locations continue and this is where you can actually select something to you know choose locations for your account. This is not my real account so I have access to none here. Sometimes I ask my client send me access to your business profile. I need to link it to Google ads or you can enter a domain send that request to the client as well. Either way works. Generally, I just ask for ask for the access so I can just do it myself and get it done with. So, that will put an additional phone call. So, it's going to be called clicks to call. Don't believe I have one cuz I don't have my Google business profile set up here, but it puts another one through the contact. So, a contact type and it's going to say clicks to call and the conversion source is going to be Google hosted. So, the same way YouTube created these ones automatically like I didn't set these up. These are created when you link YouTube. When you do actually do that with your Google business profile, it's going to create a few additional conversions. One of them being clicks to call. So over here, the three different call conversions. Let's just recreate them. We're going to create a conversion action. And for these, it's conversions from phone calls. So we're going to click on that. Phone call lead, create conversion, calls from ads. So somebody clicks a call or a call asset. Perfect. We can create another conversion here. So we can create all three at once. Calls from website visits. Somebody calls a number shown on my website. Desktop phone calls. Go right to your website. Copy that number. And in this case, I can keep them both the same. This is the phone number callers should reach. This is the phone number as it looks on your website. So, this needs to match the exact format. I just match Google Ads format. You don't have to, but I do just to make it easy. So, we do that one. Use this event. We have a second conversion. Last one is going to be calls from website visits again. And this is going to be when somebody makes a call by clicking on a number on my website. So this one we're going to use this event and save and continue. Okay. So now we have three new conversion actions. So when we have them, you're going to see basically this is saying there's no Google tag set up for this account. I'll show you how to set up your Google tag. And then how to actually install both of these. So these are the new conversions. You can see the names of them. These are going to be placed under the phone call lead conversion goal. This is desktop phone calls. This is mobile click to call. This is just what Google names them. So, we'll rename them. We can finish for right now. Now, we just have to set them up and then make sure they're working. So, we come over here to we should have additional phone call leads. Basically, the two inactive ones are the ones we need to set up. We're going to set them up exactly as I set up the other one. And then calls from ads one. This is going to be basically I'm going to remove this conversion for right now. I'm just showing you how to create it. But how to set this up, we're just going to keep it as you just need one of these. So, this one we are going to remove this conversion action. I just wanted to show you how to create it. So that is the calls from ads conversion track conversion action within your actual campaigns. Basically what you're going to do is in your search campaign you are going to go to your assets. When you're creating your ads you can set these up. Go to call assets and then from there you want to add a phone call number. You can see I don't really want phone calls for my campaign but phone calls are really a I mean I should take phone calls for my campaign. I just know I'm not going to be answering the phone for ad calls and especially for Google ads consulting like you can book online do it all online don't call me. So add call we have the phone number here conversion action. So you'll see the use account settings calls from ads that is our conversion that is right in our account and we can click on save. You can actually set up like scheduling within this and say I only want this to run Monday through Friday 9 to5 you know like business hours. So calls from ads. So now this is set up. The way this conversion works, this is calls from ads. The way this conversion works is when somebody does actually click on your phone call number, whether on a mobile device, your ad may appear with a mo a clickable call button. Or if you're on a desktop device, your ad may appear with a phone number that's a call this business. Basically, somebody clicks on it and it's going to show a number that's that's generally a tracking number, like a a call, a number that's a able to be tracked. So then when that call is placed, if those phone calls last longer than 60 seconds, they count as a conversion. So really good phone call conversion actually because 60-second plus phone calls tend to be pretty good. If you get a lot of them every month, then you're usually getting some pretty good conversion results. Generally calls from ads come a lot from branded searches, but they can come for all types of searches. It could be, you know, as simple as roofer near me, and your ad shows somebody says, "Okay, I'm going to just call this business." And it could be that simple. So, the other two that we need are actually after somebody clicks through to your advertisement, gets to your website, and then places that phone call. Keep in mind, some people there's longer cycles for some people. For certain services, there's longer cycles. If you're installing retaining walls, most people don't wake up one morning and say, "I'm going to get a retaining wall." If you are doing plumbing leaks, it's usually a very quick timing because you need to fix a plumbing leak. If you're doing auto repair, like certain things in terms of time sensitive are much quicker. So, I generally like to leave my when I'm setting my conversion actions up, I generally like to leave the click-through conversion window pretty long. And in some cases, I'll even set this as long as they possibly let me go to 60 days, set them long for all of your call conversions because at the end of the day, it's somebody clicked on my ad 45 days ago and then they're calling me today. I would like to still actually have that conversion be recorded into my account because it was if they're able to tie it back to Google Ads, I'd rather do it that way. So, that is going to be the first one. calls from ads. The next one is going to be our desktop phone calls. So that one is going to look like this. So call a number conversion source website. Click on this one. Now we're going to start using tag manager a little bit. This is the same thing. A 60-second phone call that goes through this number. We're going to increase our clickth through conversion window. This one we can go up to 60 days as well. Okay. So that's another good one. We'll go back to our goals. They So this one to install it, you click on the actual conversion action itself. We scroll to the bottom, go to tag setup, use Google Tag Manager, and you're going to have a conversion ID and a conversion label here. Go back to Google Tag Manager. So, we've installed this. Go to our workspace. We want to go to tags. And the first thing you need to add is your conversion linker tag. So, new tag. Can name it conversion linker. I already have this, so we'll name it conversion linker 2, and we'll delete it after I record this. Google Ads conversion linker. You can enable linking on all page URLs. That's fine. Usually what I do is all pages page view or initialization all pages. I don't really know the difference between these. Don't do consent initialization, but usually I just do all pages page view. Either one works. I think I have it probably set up differently in different accounts. So conversion linker 2 all pages. Need to do that one. That's just kind of a you have to install. Make sure you add a conversion linker tag. That just has to be installed once in Google Tag Manager and then once you do it, it's it's there. Basically connects Google Tag Manager and Google Ads so they can talk. Next is going to be I call this we're just going to call it desktop phone calls. Keep it consistent naming. Google ads. This one is a Google ads calls from website conversion displayed phone number that we need to replace. So in this one, what we're going to do is we're actually going to go to you you can go right to your details and just copy it right here because this is your displayed phone number and we can paste that right here. Then we need our conversion ID. So we'll take that right here. Put the conversion ID and then the conversion label. Now, I'm actually going to copy the conversion ID really quickly, and I'll show you why. So, we're going to copy this right now, but we'll go back over here. So, display phone number to replace exactly as it's displayed on your website. Conversion ID for your conversion action. This is the same across your entire account. Conversion label, and then triggering for this one is just all pages page view. It's tracking the actual phone call. We just need the tag in place on every page. So when that phone call happens lasts over 60 seconds, Google tracks it as a conversion. I already have this. So we'll do desktop phone calls 2 and save it. Okay. So we have our our desktop phone calls. Now that is set up. We just need to submit our workspace. So always submit your workspace. I I usually submit it pretty frequently just to make sure I don't ever forget to submit it. I have forgotten to submit it after setting things up at times which is very frustrating. So desktop phone calls. Next is going to be mobile clicks the call. So that one we will come back to our goals over here. So you can see we have this one set up already. This is our the one we just actually incorporated. Now I said previously that I took that and we will take this. This is our newest one. It's click to call. This is what it's going to be called. Call from ads. So we'll take that one. This is the the mobile clicks to call. That's why I think I've always called it mobile clicks to call. Edit setting. Mobile clicks to call two. I'm going to have to make sure I delete all of these conversions so I don't have double conversions in my account. Mobile clicks to call two. date created action optimization. These are all perfectly fine. Clickthrough conversion window. This one goes up to 90 days. Sometimes I'll put this one up to like 45 since it doesn't actually track the phone call. A lot of times I don't set this one that long. View through I do set a little bit longer to like 3 days because just in case I'm running a lot of video ads, I'm running a lot of performance max. Sometimes I like to get a little bit of credit for a view through conversion. If you are doing all those things, attribution will be data driven. Perfect. We are all good to go. We'll go back to our details over here. Scroll down. Now, this if we go to tag manager, your conversion ID, one of the things you could do, it could be one of the first steps after installing conversion linker. I'm surprised they don't actually have it there, but if we come over to our tag manager, I have it already created. It's a new tag. You're just going to call it, you can call it Google Ads conversion tracking tag. Now, this tag isn't absolutely necessary, but it does track additional additional insights, additional data into your account. And if we come over here, Google tag. It's going to be you're going to do awen. And then copy and paste that tag there. Initialization all pages. Save. And this is one I would just recommend setting up. It is your Google Ads tag. So it's just another thing that tracks a little better and and connects Google Tag Manager to Google Ads and what's happening on the website. So let's set up our mobile clicks to call conversion. We have our conversion ID and label here. One thing you may have to do for this one is go to variables, go to configure, and you need to make sure you have click URL as one of the built-in variables. So, you can see it's already set for one of mine. So, click URL. All right. So, we have it on there. Make sure we have it on there. Go back to our tags. Create a new and we'll do mobile clicks to call. You can name these Google Ads conversion tracking, but Google Ads Google Ads conversion tracking. We need our conversion ID and we need our conversion label. So, we'll copy all of those. Okay. And then we're going to trigger this is going to be it's set up here already, but it's click on the plus sign up here. I usually call it tell teel. We'll do tell two and then click and it's going to be just links. Some link clicks when the click URL contains teel. So, that's that's one thing that you can do. Um, if we click on the plus sign here, this is fire the trigger when event occurs and all of these conditions are true. You can actually set up a so this is onscreen duration. On-screen duration is essentially a timer. It is in milliseconds. So if we do oncreen duration is greater than maybe we just do longer than 30 seconds. I think that's 30,000. If we get this correctly and click on save, that's actually going to make sure that the person doesn't just come to the website, click a button, and leave. It's like they're actually on the website for longer than 30 seconds. You can set this to 60 60 seconds as well. The other thing that you can do is there's variables you can actually use to say how big their screen is. So you can actually limit it to mobile devices. That is something that I do at times and it's something that you know it can it can help just avoid people who are on mobile devices who are clicking that link. But you can technically make calls directly from your desktop device. So I actually think the timer is a better because most people and and you could set that timer higher if you're getting too many mobile clicks to call. But this is kind of one of the workarounds. The other thing is never optimize performance max for mobile clicks the call because it is not going to work. It's going to over report and you need to make sure that you're only tracking like long phone calls in performance max or you're just going to get a ton of phone calls and they're going to be crappy or you're going to get a ton of mobile clicks to call conversions and they're not going to be real. So this is phone call tracking. The very last step would be when you're setting up your campaigns and you go into your actual campaign settings. First, you want to make sure all those are primary conversion actions in your conversion goals. Make sure you are optimizing for phone call leads. If you're using account default settings and their primary conversions, they should automatically pop in. Um, and then just make sure you only have the three. It should be basically these are the three I always have. Calls from ads directly from your call assets, desktop phone calls, call forwarding, that is tracking when people actually type in the physical number on their phone, really good conversion, mobile clicks to call, tracking when people actually click on the link on your website. mobile clicks to call can definitely over report. So that's one you you want to check and just make sure it's not doing that. So this will wrap up phone call conversion tracking in Google ads. Again, if you're looking for a little bit more accurate data, call rail is kind of the way to go. If you come over to your actual insights and reports report editor and we scroll all the way to the bottom, you actually have a call details report. It'll show you phone numbers. It'll show you when the call happened, duration of the call, all sorts of different things. So call details gives you a lot of data as well. So you could actually take all those phone numbers, go back to your CRM and, you know, compare them and see how it came out. Call Rail again, another I think I just said this, but if you have any questions about this, please leave them in the comments section. Thank you for watching my video today and make sure you subscribe to the Surfside PPC YouTube