Tracking 'Click to Call' and Manually Dialed Calls as Google Ad Conversions

Google Ads has call conversion tracking you can set up that will track when a Google Ad visitor makes a call from your website and it will count it as a "Google Ad Conversion". It will only trigger a conversion if the call lasts, by default, 60 seconds long. You can of course change this to be any length of time like say 30 seconds or 90 seconds. The way it works is it dynamically replaces the phone number on your website with a dynamic call forwarding number. The documentation however is not clear about whether or not it replaces the phone number used in the HTML hyperlink. This always had me concerned about whether or not Google Ads call conversion tracking is tracking when a Google Ad visitor "taps" or clicks on the phone number to initiate a call. Because of this, I had always set up a second conversion to track when a Google Ad visitor clicks on the phone hyperlink to ensure all bases are covered.

Lately however, I've been working more with CallRails and WhatConverts. They also will dynamically replace the phone number on your website with one of their phone numbers for tracking purposes. It will replace the number displayed visually on the website AND they replace the number used in the HTML hyperlink to account for click to calls AND users who read the number displayed visually on the website and manually dial the number on a second device like a phone. This is also unclear in CallRails and WhatConverts documentation but after testing them out, it is in fact how it works.

This is probably also how Google Ad's call conversion tracking works. I've never been able to test it because I don't manage any Google Ad campaigns in the location I live in. All my client's lead gen campaigns target other locations. With that said, I'll probably continue to just use CallRails or WhatConverts when it comes to call conversion tracking. I prefer WhatConverts since it does allow me to easily send offline conversions to Google Ads.

If you are wanting to use Google Ad's native call conversion tracking however, here's how you can set it up using Google Tag Manager:

Make sure the phone number format you enter matches the phone number format on your website. So if your phone number is (888) 234-5555, you'll want to make sure you enter (888) 234-5555 and not say 888-234-555.You get the Conversion ID and Conversion Label from Google Ads when creating a new conversion.

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