How To Setup Call Tracking On Google My Business

How To Setup Call Tracking on Google My Business

Per the latest set of marketing statistics released by HubSpot, just 22% of businesses are satisfied with their conversion rates.

It’s no secret that you’re going to spend time and money to continuously acquire customers.

If your business is going to be spending that money, it’s important that a portion of that amount is spent on converting them.

One way to potentially boost your conversions is through tracking phone calls through Google. Google allows businesses to setup call tracking on Google My Business pages so that you can monitor how effective your marketing efforts are. This is especially useful in local marketing efforts.

(Note: If you want to learn how to setup and optimize a Google My Business page, check out our blog post on how to do so)

Back in September of 2014, Google made the addition of a feature that allows a business to see the number of times they were called from a GMB listing.

Having the benefit of being able to see the number of calls generated from your GMB listing can be a significant player when it comes to boosting conversion rates. Your business will be able to find what is and isn’t working and allow your business to make necessary adjustments.

We’re going to show you how to setup call tracking on Google My Business, but first it’s important to dig a little deeper into what it is and why it can help.

What Is It?

Google is basically collecting the data by tracking the number of clicks that are made on the phone number associated with a GMB page. This is the most useful for mobile searches as they can easily click the phone number and instantly connect with your business.

No matter the size of your business, tracking phone calls is a great tool to use to find where they’re being generated from. Because this is most useful for those searching on mobile devices, it can provide a business with valuable insight to how many people are finding them via mobile versus desktop.

Tracking calls through your GMB listing can also potentially save you money. For example, if someone is spending a large amount of money on a specific campaign but are finding that very few calls are generated from it, that business can adjust and find out where you could best allocate that money.

Now that we have a greater understanding of what call tracking is and how it can benefit your business, we’re going to show you how to set it up.

Step 1: Sign into Google AdWords

Once you sign into your Google AdWords account, you’ll be taken to the homepage. From the homepage, click on “Tools” in the toolbar and go to “Conversions”.

This will take you to your conversions dashboard that has any previous conversion campaigns launched by your business. Once here, click the red “Conversion” button.

Step 2: Select source of conversion

Once the conversion button is selected, the next page we’ll come to is where you can select the source of conversion you want to setup.

To set up call tracking on Google My Business, we are going to select the “Phone calls” category. As a result, this will bring up a popup window that offers you 3 options to choose from:

• Calls from ads using call extensions or call-only ads
  • Google forwarding numbers is required for this
• Calls to a phone number on your website
  • You’ll need to add a tag to your site and use Google forwarding numbers
• Clicks on your number on your mobile website
  • You’ll only need to add a tag to your website

We want to see how many people are calling your business through the number listed on your GMB page. Because of this, we’re going to select the third option and click “Continue”. This option requires you to copy and paste a tag to your website. If you’re unsure how to do that yourself, it would be a good idea to contact your web developer.

Step 3: New conversion action

In this step, you’ll need to fill out some information regarding how you want your conversion action to perform.

Here, you can assign a name that you will easily recognize in your reports. You can also edit things like the value of each conversion, conversion count, windows, a category and an attribution model.

Once you choose a name, you’ll be asked to determine a value that each conversion is worth to your business. In this section, you have three options: equal value for each phone call click, differing values on each call click and no value assigned.

The easiest one to start with is the first option. Businesses place the same value on each click that their phone number gets from their GMB page. This lets your business easily track the number of clicks without having to account for different values.

Next, you’ll enter the dollar amount of value that you’d like each click to have.

The following section, “Count”, is where you choose how you’d like to count your conversions. You have two choices:

• Every
  • One ad click leads to three purchases = three conversions
• One
  • One ad click leads to three purchases = one conversion

The option you choose is up to you. Basically, you can count your conversions based on how many purchases you generate from one click (whether it be one, two, six, etc.) or count each click as one conversion (no matter how many purchases that click leads to).

Once this is done, the next step is to select how long you wish your conversion window to be. Generally, 30 days is what most people go with. However, you can select as short as one week or as long as three months.

From here, choosing the category that best fits your conversion action will help you evaluate conversions that are similar in your report. You’ll have the option to pick from purchase/sale, lead, sign-up and other.

So, once your settings are completed, click “Save and Continue” at the bottom of the page.

Step 4: Review and install tag to your website

The final step in this process is to look over all of your settings that you want for your conversion and then to install the tag on your website.

Adding the provided tag to your website and making the suggested changes are crucial in this step. In order to setup call tracking on Google My Business, this tag needs to be put on the site.

Again, if you’re not comfortable adding the tag to your site on your own, your website developer will do it for you.

You are now able to begin call tracking on Google My Business! It’s important to consistently check in on how your page is performing. This way, you’re able to make any necessary changes immediately should you find something you don’t like.

If you want to have us review your website and give you a free 30-minute consultation where we show you how to generate more local customers from your website, click here.