With thousands of articles explain the details of running a Google “Call – Only”, I thought I’ll give it a fair shot.

There has been major increases in customers asking for these types of campaigns without truly understanding the full scope of what that entails.

Chances are, you’re part of the 51 percent of mobile searchers who admit to calling businesses often.

But just because mobile technology is increasing our inbound phone leads, it doesn’t mean we should go all in on this marketing channel.

What is Google Ads call tracking?

Google Ads call tracking is a type of conversion tracking that shows you how many prospective customers called your business after seeing or clicking one of your PPC placements.

Who uses Google Ads call tracking?

Any advertiser looking to drive phone calls to their business — and therefore gain a better understand how their marketing is helping drive those calls — should be using call tracking.

Google Ads, along with other call tracking services like CallRail, can show you which search keywords are driving the most calls as well as performance breakdowns by demographics and location, and your placement’s general positioning in SERP results.

How to set up Google Ads call tracking

Setting up Google Ads call tracking for forwarding numbers is simple: You only need to add call extensions to your ad(s), and then enable call reporting in Google Ads and Analytics.

During the setup, you’ll have to create a conversion action for a phone call under the ‘Tools > Conversions‘ menu in Ads, which you’ll then select when creating your call extension.

Keyword prices are higher in phone calls campaigns

Before you start with Call-Only campaigns, you need to make a decision on what a call cost for you and be able to justify that with actual data points because things can get really expensive quick.

Being able to establish an idea of what you are willing to pay for a call is important when setting up your campaigns as keywords (calls) are much higher in this market, then in a traditional search campaign.

Call fraud in PPC campaigns

Call fraud happens a couple of ways inside PPC campaigns.

Irrelevant and spammy calls are often generated in PPC campaigns with poor location and/or keyword targeting. Who wants to get calls for a region they don’t serve or a service they don’t provide?

Sometimes call campaigns are assigned what’s called “dirty numbers,” which means they’ve been used before by another business.

When advertisers get assigned “dirty numbers” they end up paying for leads that are irrelevant and were really intended for another business. This is more of a spammy type of call fraud.

Short conclusion

If you’re looking to achieve a more complete picture of which PPC ads are driving customers to pick up the phone, then call tracking software is a great solution.

By pairing call tracking software with Google Ads, you’ll be armed with robust data and analytics to support your decision-making the next time you optimize a campaign.