Google Ads call tracking: The ultimate guide

Are you looking to launch your Google Ads campaigns into the digital stratosphere with maximum results? Then it’s time to uncover the power of Google Ads call tracking for your campaigns with our ultimate guide.

What is call tracking?

Call tracking is powerful analytics software that accurately tracks and analyses the calls from all your marketing campaigns, including your paid ads.

Phone calls are still important for driving enquiries and sales for businesses. So it’s equally as important to have the right tools in place to monitor them.

With Mediahawk’s call tracking platform you receive detailed reports and analytics for every inbound call. You can attribute calls to specific marketing campaigns, ads, keywords, and channels, with valuable insights into their effectiveness. This information can be used to make more strategic, data-driven decisions to optimise your campaigns.

Why is call tracking in Google Ads so important?

Google Ads is a paid advertising platform that allows your business to reach potential customers through various ad formats – including search, display, video, shopping, and vehicle listing ads.

While these result in online conversions, a significant portion of enquiries and sales will also occur over the phone.

To maximise your leads and sales, you need the most effective method of monitoring the performance of your campaigns. Here’s how tracking calls from Google Ads improves your conversions:

• Measuring the effectiveness of your ad campaigns: Tracking calls from Google Ads campaigns enables you to attribute them to specific ad groups, keywords, or campaigns. This reveals your most effective advertising strategies and keywords, highlighting strong performing campaigns, and revealing the areas for improvement.
• Optimising your return on investment (ROI): Send conversion data into Google Ads to reveal the true ROI of your ad campaigns. You can compare the cost of advertising to the revenue generated from phone leads and sales.
• Revealing the entire customer journey: Call tracking helps you map out the entire customer journey. It reveals every touchpoint a user visited before, during, and after a call – including Google Ads. You’ll have full visibility over all the ways each customer interacts with your business.
• Gaining valuable customer insights: Call tracking for Google Ads provides meaningful insights into caller interactions, such as the keywords their searches match to, their journey through your website, their previous interactions with you, and the revenue generated. This lets you create customer profiles and identify the campaigns that will help you achieve your objectives.

How to track calls and conversions in Google Ads

There are a couple of ways of call tracking in Google Ads: Google Ads has built-in tools, or you can use third-party providers like Mediahawk.

The process typically involves setting up unique phone numbers for your ads so each customer call is captured by the platform and attributed to the right campaign.

However, it’s important to ensure you choose the right method of call tracking for the best results.

Google Ads built-in tools

Some marketers may consider Google’s tools, including call extensions and website call conversions. They can be useful at a basic level, but they have limitations and drawbacks:

• Limited reporting: The reporting capabilities of Google Ads’ call tracking tools are basic and limited in data. They only allow you to track conversions through Google Ads. You won’t have the level of granularity and insights needed for effective campaign optimisation.
• Incomplete customer journeys: Google’s native tools will only track the customer journey up until the point they leave the session on your website. If the visitor returns, this will be logged as an entirely new journey, giving inaccurate data. They also don’t take into account any visits from any other sources, so you can’t effectively track multichannel journeys.
• Increased costs: Bidding on keywords in Google can be expensive, and without tools that let you analyse granular data for conversions, you’ll end up wasting spend. Google also charges the same for a call as they do for a click, so costs can quickly spiral out of control if you find that you’re getting a lot of calls.
• Recycled numbers: Google recycles phone numbers, so you may be charged for a call meant for another business, from someone who has written down the number from a different search.
• Lack of advanced features: Call tracking with Google Ads tools leaves you lacking the advanced features of third-party providers. You won’t have the most effective methods of monitoring your conversions and making data-driven decisions for campaign growth.

Use Mediahawk to help track calls [recommended]

If you’re serious about maximising your marketing performance, you should consider third-party solutions like Mediahawk’s call tracking.

Mediahawk is a leading call tracking and analytics platform that seamlessly integrates with Google Ads, offering advanced features and robust reporting capabilities. There are many reasons to use

Mediahawk for Google Ads call tracking if you want a comprehensive and reliable solution:

• Extensive insights: Mediahawk’s platform provides meaningful insights and detailed reports that extend far beyond the capabilities of Google Ads’ tools. This ranges from visitor-to-call ratio and keyword tracking, through to sending audience signals, conversion and revenue data into the ad platform.
• Complete visibility: The visitor-level tracking from Mediahawk lets you see the entire journey of every single customer, even if they leave a session on your website and join again later. You can also track calls from online and offline sources for a full overview of your marketing performance.
• Smooth integration: Mediahawk integrates out-of-the-box with Google Ads and Looker for reporting. Crucial data is both pushed into and pulled from Google and Mediahawk so you can see your key metrics in one place.
• Packed full of powerful features: Call tracking for Google Ads with Mediahawk gives you access to a suite of powerful features to further improve results. This includes our AI-driven Speech Analytics, which intelligently analyses call conversations that result from your paid ads – and any other channels.

Dick Lovett, the privately-owned automotive dealer group in South West England and Wales, discovered the benefits of managing calls from Google Ads and other channels with call tracking. They used visitor-level call tracking and Sales Matching from Mediahawk to gain a closer eye on how their budget was being spent and what was driving traffic to their website.

Performance Max call tracking

Another key aspect of Google Ads call tracking in your marketing strategies is knowing how to refine your Performance Max (Pmax) campaigns.

What is Performance Max?

Performance Max is a new campaign type introduced by Google Ads that leverages Artificial Intelligence (AI) to enhance your campaigns based on your conversion goals. The aim is to optimise ad delivery and placements automatically, based on real-time data and signals, according to the goals you have for each campaign – such as driving online sales or lead generation.

How does tracking calls from Performance Max campaigns differ?

When it comes to monitoring calls from Performance Max campaigns, the process is not so different from Google Ads call tracking. Unique phone numbers will be assigned to your campaigns to help capture and attribute calls to their source.

However, there’s a significant difference in results when you add Mediahawk’s call tracking software into the mix.

Integrating Mediahawk’s platform with GA4 and Google Ads allows you to send highly relevant audience signals into Google Ads. Ads then uses this data to optimise your Performance Max campaigns. This yields greater conversions, richer insights, and more high-value customers.

Just look at the UK’s leading lawn turf supplier, George Davies Turf, as an example. They utilised Mediahawk to gain greater visibility over their lead generation and transform their marketing performance – including their Performance Max campaigns.

Will the phase-out of third-party cookies change Google Ads call tracking?

Google is set to stop supporting third-party cookies at the end of 2024, which will have a significant impact on digital advertising.

After all, 65% of global web users use Google Chrome and many marketers rely heavily on third-party cookies for targeting ad campaigns. When it hits, this change will affect things from audience targeting to attribution modelling and measurement.

But fear not.

While the phase-out of third-party cookies makes tracking campaigns harder, it also presents an opportunity for your business to focus on first-party data collection. With Mediahawk’s platform, there’s an answer to running and optimising your Google Ads campaigns without third-party cookies.

Mediahawk acts as a centralised platform to store and analyse all your first-party online and offline campaign data. Everything from social media campaigns to Google Ads will push data into the software, giving you all the power for data-driven campaign improvements.

This first-party data can also be organised and segmented how you see fit. You can pull the most useful insights from your campaigns to give you meaningful strategies for optimising your ads.

Our PPC expert Hayley Thomas shared her thoughts on the phasing-out of third-party cookies: “Losing third-party cookies doesn’t have to mean losing your competitive marketing edge. With a platform like Mediahawk, you have access to more data than ever before. There’s so much untapped potential to improve your Google Ads campaigns using first-party data from multiple sources – both on- and off-line. What’s more, using features such as Speech Analytics to send detailed insights into Google as custom audiences and signals, means you can fine-tune your campaigns based on what you know converts. It’s a really exciting opportunity for marketers.”

“With a platform like Mediahawk, you have access to more data than ever before. There’s so much untapped potential to improve your Google Ads campaigns using first-party data from multiple sources – both on- and off-line. What’s more, using features such as Speech Analytics to send detailed insights into Google as custom audiences and signals, means you can fine-tune your campaigns based on what you know converts. It’s a really exciting opportunity for marketers.”
– Hayley Thomas, Digital Marketing Manager, Mediahawk

How remarketing is affected by the loss of third-party cookies

Remarketing involves targeting users who have previously interacted with a brand’s website or app.

Naturally, this will become much harder with the phase-out of third-party cookies. Traditional remarketing techniques that rely on tracking user behaviour and browsing history will be significantly impacted.

This is where Mediahawk’s call tracking and attribution data provides you with the insight you need.

Third-party cookies are created by a different domain than the one you’re on. It’s first-party cookies which are more reliable and targeted, since they come directly from your customers on your domain. With first-party data, you can create custom audiences, then target a group of users with similar interests and needs with personalised ads to draw in valuable leads.

Also, with advanced features like Speech Analytics, you can create remarketing ads based entirely on the conversations had over the phone. The software will pick up certain keywords mentioned in a call, letting you categorise that user into a particular interest or service to produce more effective retargeting.

As you can see, there’s only one option when it comes to truly unlocking your Google Ads potential and maximising your conversions – and it’s call tracking software.

That being said, Google Ads call tracking is just one part of the marketing attribution tools Mediahawk offers.

Speak to us today to learn more about how Mediahawk’s tools can help you reach new heights within your marketing efforts.

This blog was first published in October 2019, and updated in June 2024.