This scenario may sound familiar to you. A local business hires you to manage their Google Ads, so you set up the campaign, start generating conversions and you're thinking 'Hell yea, the client is going to be so happy!'. You report to the client and their response is:

"What's the name and/or the number of the lead that came from the Google Ad? I didn't get a lead from Google Ads."

Unfortunately, that's just not how Google Ad Conversion Tracking works, at least not the basic setup (more on that later!).

Many will try and just drive Google Ad traffic to a dedicated landing page so they know any form submissions that come from that landing page came from Google Ads.

The problem with this method of tracking is that it assumes the customer journey is linear. It assumes visitors will always convert on the landing page you send them. In reality, a lot of the time visitors will go to the homepage or main website and convert there.

Sometimes they'll come back days later and go to the homepage or main website.

Do you have email links on your website? Do you have 'click to call' functionality on your phone numbers? Do you have a chat?

You'll only be able to track the clicks as conversions, in which case you won't know the name of the visitor that converted this way.

You'll also never know the names of the leads calling from Google Ad via the Call Extension. It's just not how Google Ad Call Conversion tracking works. It can only tell you if a call lasted X seconds long.

The reason they want to know this info is obvious. They want to be able to track their return on ad spend with the Google Ad campaign.

The bad news is they're trying to do it the wrong way.

You can get this info for the client by using UTM parameters and capturing that data in a hidden form field to be passed along to the sales CRM, but this only works for form submissions and it's not easy to get this data back into your campaign to use it for optimizations.

The best way to do it is to set up something called 'offline conversion tracking'. Click Here to read more about how this works.