Call Me Excited! Google AdWords Rolls Out Website Call Conversions

Visibility into performance is essential for any Paid Search campaign so marketers know if they’re making the right moves when optimizing for performance.  Phone call tracking at the website level is often a hurdle for many leaving an incomplete picture of the true number of conversions.  Solutions from third party phone tracking companies have existed for years, but they come with an additional expense and can be complicated for many to implement.  Today things come full circle for AdWords marketers who want to fully track Call Conversions with the debut of AdWords Website Call Conversions. Website Call Conversions, announced on Inside AdWords, essentially work like this.  With Call Extensions enabled create a new Conversion and generate code snippets supplied by Google to your website and when the incoming call is identified as AdWords. Here is a high-level summary of how Website Call Conversions work.

•  Ensure Call Extensions are enabled
• Create new conversion and generate a general code snippet
• Add general code snippet to the website
• Create phone number snippet
• Add phone number snippet to the website wherever you want a phone number to display

The process in more detail. Ensure Call Extensions are enabled

1. Visit the Ad Extension tab and choose Call Extensions from the View Menu
2. Select the existing call extension associated to your campaign or adgroup and click edit.
3. An “Edit Extension” function will appear.  Click Edit (small pencil icon) to edit the extension.
4. An “edit phone number’ function will appear.  Make sure the “show my ad with” section is set to use ‘A Google forwarding phone number’ which uses call reporting.
5. Save your settings.

Create a Website Call Conversion

1. From the Tools Menu select Conversions
2. Click the +CONVERSION button to create a new Conversion.
3. Enter a conversion name and select ‘Calls to a Google forwarding number on your website’ as your Conversion source.
4. Configure your Conversion settings; Value, Category, Window, Count, and Call Length.
5. Save Settings

Creating and adding code snippet to the website The next step is to create the code snippet that needs to be placed on the website. Add the code snippet to either the header of your website to cover all pages or if you want the phone number to show up in a specific place on a page place the code where you want the number to appear. Reviewing Performance Website Call Conversions will be compatible with Targeted CPA, eCPC, ROAS and Search Funnels. Reporting Data can be located in the following areas in the AdWords Interface:

1. Keywords tab will provide data on Call Conversions under the Converted Clicks and Est total Conversion columns.
2. Conversion Reporting (Tools & Analysis > Conversions) section will provide data on the source of conversions and Website Call Conversions will be labeled as ‘Calls from website’.
3. Call Details Report will display Call type as ‘calls from Website’ and provide data on items like call location, duration, area code and more.

This is a great move forward to help AdWords advertisers have more visibility into their account performance.  I am assuming until I hear otherwise that the calls come at no cost and instead Google monetizes this feature by a cost per click.  I am also interested to know how this will work if advertisers want to track calls from multiple channels.  Will no phone number show up if the traffic comes from a source other than AdWords i.e. Organic?