Call tracking before you raise the ad budget

February is when owners start asking us to spend more. The slow start to the year is over, the phone is busier, and the obvious move is to push the Google Ads budget up.

Our answer is usually the same. Show us the conversions first. In almost every account we take over, the problem is not the keywords or the ad copy. It is that nobody can say which calls came from Google Ads, and nobody has decided which of those calls was worth having. Raising the budget on top of that just buys more of whatever the account is already buying, and the account does not know what that is.

Here is the setup we put in before we touch a budget.

Why the tracking comes first

Two reasons, and the second one is the expensive one.

The first is that you cannot manage what you cannot see. If half your leads arrive by phone and none of them are recorded, every report you get is about form fills, and the account gets optimised towards form fills.

The second is automated bidding. If you are on Maximize conversions or target CPA, Google is learning from whatever you told it a conversion is. Tell it that a nine second wrong number is a conversion and it will go and find you more of them, efficiently and at scale. Bad conversion data with Smart Bidding is worse than no Smart Bidding.

The three conversions a local account actually has

Strip it back. For a dental practice, a clinic, a contractor or a salon, there are three things that count:

1. A call placed from the ad itself. Someone taps the call extension or the call-only ad and never lands on your site.
2. A call placed from your website by someone who clicked an ad. The bigger number for most of our clients, and the one usually missing.
3. A form, booking request or chat. Anything typed rather than dialled.

Everything else is a signal, not a conversion. Map clicks, PDF downloads, a visit to the pricing page: useful to look at, dangerous to bid on.

Setting calls up so they count once

Calls from ads. Turn on call extensions with a Google forwarding number and create the “calls from ads” conversion action. Then set a minimum call length. We use sixty seconds for most practices and service businesses. Anything shorter is a wrong number, a supplier or someone asking for directions. Thirty seconds can be right for a business that takes quick price questions, but do not leave it at the default and forget about it.

Calls from the website. The Google Ads tag can swap the number on your site for a forwarding number when the visitor came from an ad, and record the call as a conversion with the same minimum duration. This needs the phone number to be real text on the page, in a format Google can read, not baked into an image.

Third-party call tracking. If you use a dedicated call tracking platform with dynamic number insertion, two rules. Keep your real number as the number on your Google My Business listing, in your footer and in your page markup, and only swap the display number for paid traffic. And test that the swap does not leak into organic visits, because a rotating number on your site does you no favours in local search.

Then answer the phone. We pull call logs in the first month of every new account and the missed call count is often the biggest single finding in the audit. No bidding strategy fixes a phone that rings out at 4:40pm.

The settings that quietly break the numbers

These are the ones we find wrong most often, in roughly that order.

• Include in “Conversions” is on for everything. Only real leads belong in that column, because that is the column bidding uses. Page views and clicks to the map should be recorded as secondary and left out of it.
• Count is set to Every instead of One. For lead generation you want one conversion per click. Otherwise a customer who calls twice while deciding looks like two new patients.
• The conversion window is left at the default. Thirty days is fine for a cleaning or a drain unblock. For implants, orthodontics or a kitchen remodel the decision takes longer, and a short window hides the leads that took six weeks to call.
• Everything is counted twice. Importing a Universal Analytics goal for the same form that the Google Ads tag is already recording will double your conversions and halve your apparent cost per lead. Pick one source of truth per action.
• Auto-tagging is off. Without it there is no GCLID, so the ad platform and your CRM never agree about anything.
• Nobody knows what “All conv.” means. Report on one column, consistently, and say out loud which one it is.

Once the tracking is honest, put a field on your intake form or in your CRM for how the lead found you, and compare that against the platform every month. When the two stories disagree, the answer is usually somewhere in the settings above.

What to do this month

1. List your conversion actions in Google Ads and check the “Include in Conversions” setting on each one. Turn off anything that is not a lead.
2. Set a minimum call length of sixty seconds on every call conversion and see how the last month’s numbers change.
3. Add website call conversions if calls from your site are not being recorded at all.
4. Check that your listing, your footer and your markup all show the same real phone number.
5. Pull the last thirty days of call logs and count the calls that went unanswered, then fix the coverage before you fix the bids.
6. Only then look at the budget.

This is the first week of work on every Google Ads account we take on, and it usually turns up something on the website as well, since that is where most of the calls actually start. If the numbers in your account have never quite matched what the front desk sees, that gap is where to look first.