Easily Track Phone Calls in Google Ads 📱😄

One of the best and underutilized functions in Google Ads is the ability to be able to track phone calls and actually see some real life data in your Google Ads dashboard. And surprisingly many people don't even know that this data is available or how to access it and view it. Because if you're tracking phone calls in Google Ads, you can actually see the time the phone call was made, which search term actually triggered the ad which generated the phone call, the duration of the phone call, and even the user's actual phone number. And as you can imagine, this data is so valuable as Google Ads managers because with that data we can actually see which keywords are actually not only generating phone calls, but which keywords are generating the longer phone calls. Because in this situation, when it comes to a phone call, the longer a phone call goes for it gives a very strong signal of a higher quality lead. Because if someone has stayed on the phone for five minutes, it's much more likely that they're really interested or they've completed a sale on your product versus a phone call which only lasts 10 seconds or 30 seconds. Plus additional to that, being able to actually see the actual phone number means that you can marry up the data that you're seeing in Google Ads versus any real life conversions that took place in your business or your client's business. And further to call duration and also being able to see the actual number of the phone, is that because you can actually see the keyword that triggered the ad and actually led to that phone call, you can see the search terms which are generating not only the highest number of phone calls, but the highest quality phone calls. And then you can actually review that data and start to make some really high level strategic decisions. For example, if you see that there's a keyword which is generating a lot of phone calls, but those phone calls are low quality, you can actually pause that keyword theme. Or on the other hand, if you're seeing that there's one or two keyword themes which, which is generating a high level of high quality phone calls, you could even create a separate high quality campaign which is only targeting those two keyword themes. And the benefit of that is it allows you to then assign extra budget to those high converting keyword themes. Because remember, budgets are set at that campaign level. So if you want to learn more about how to track phone calls in your own Google Ads campaigns and how to view that data, you need to stick around and watch this video. And just in case we haven't met yet, Aaron, Hi, I'm Aaron Young, and I'm your 15,000 hour Google Ads master. Since 2010, I've been creating and optimizing profitable Google Ads campaigns. And the reason for why I've seen so much success with my Google Ads campaigns is because I have a clear optimization strategy when it comes to my Google Ads campaign. Meaning that I know exactly what I need to optimize in my Google Ads account every 72 hours, every week, every month, and every 90 days. And to help you, and so that you can actually implement your very own Google Ads Optimization strategy on, I want to give you my Google Ads Optimization checklist for free. And if you want to get that right now, all you need to do is to follow the link in the description below so that you can get your very own Google Ads Optimization checklist. But right now, to get started, I want to take you into a screen share to show the exact data that you can actually see in Google Ads when you've actually got your core tracking set up correctly. Let's go and have a look. So to see the core data in your Google Ads campaign, you want to go into reports, into this predefined reports, extensions, and then go into your core details and then this brings up a lot of valuable data. But what I actually do do before I go through and review this data in full is I just get rid of some of these little caller ones. And then what you want to do is you want to search in here and you want to add in the search keyword and then we can filter this down by call duration from high to low. And what you're actually seeing in here is the actual phone numbers, the duration, so how long these phone calls actually last. And finally we can actually go over into the search keyword and we're actually seeing the keywords which have actually generated the ads which have led to these phone calls. So in this example, gym manager software or club management system, and then we can go back and cross reference it with these call durations so that we can then start to make those bigger decisions on which are the keyword things that we want to focus on for our Google Ads campaign. And as well, you've also got the campaign and the ad group data, so you can even break it down even further, further to those different segments so that you can actually get this valuable data feeding into your Google Ads dashboard. You need to firstly set up call tracking. And call tracking in your Google Ads campaign can be set up through two different ways. Firstly through using call extensions, and then secondly, you can actually set up click to call goals using Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager. And this then tracks whenever someone actually clicks or on a phone link, especially if they're using a mobile version of your website. Now firstly, let me show you how you can actually go about setting up call extensions in your Google Ads account. So to set up call tracking using ad extensions, you need to go into ad and extensions, then go into extensions. And then to add a call extension go to this blue plus sign and we want to go to call extension. Now when we're in this section here, we can decide whether we want this to be added to your account. So it's automatically added to all of the ads in your account or whether you only want it to show on certain campaigns or ad groups. But let's just select this to cover our total account. And then from there you obviously choose your country, which you're based in. For this example, we'll choose Australia. And then you just need to go through and add in a phone number. Now one thing that I do need to stress is that this phone number that you add in here actually needs to be visible on your website. So you can either use a landline or a mobile. But as I said that that phone number just needs to be really highly visible on your website in order for it to be approved. And then the great thing about this function is you don't need to set up any call tracking. All you need to do you can just use I've already got the call from ads set up, but you can just use call from ads. And then as you can see as a default conversion action, calls from ads will already be in your conversion tracking. And there are actually some extra advanced options if you wanted to add these ins. One of the ones that I will often add is if you've got a service based industry and you only want the option for people to call you through certain hours of the day, you can actually select when your call extension will be visible. So for example, if you only want this to appear Monday to Friday between 8:30 to 5:00pm, you can add these restrictions in and you can even add a restriction in if you wanted to stop and start these dates. So for example, if you've got some upcoming holidays, so that's the functionality of how we set up your call tracking. But one other thing that I did want to point out, another reason why I do really like these call extensions is because they actually increase the size of your ad. So you can see here in the mobile preview is that you've actually got an extra button below your ad and it is actually highlighted. And the way that this actually works, if someone clicks on this, you may have seen it before, a pop up will appear on your mobile and then it will take them directly to a phone call without even visiting your website. Or if they're on a desktop, it's highlighted up in this header section up here. And in both cases, these are highly beneficial for not only the way that your ad looks and appears, but it also does help your ad rank as well. So that's how easy it is to add in a call extension extensions so that you can start getting that call data feeding into Google Ads Dashboard. Now, if you'd like to use the other option and set up a click to call conversion so that you're actually tracking when someone actually clicks on a mobile link or a phone link when they're on the mobile version of your website, you can do that really, really easily using Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics and then importing that conversion action into your Google Ads campaign. And if you want to see the step by step process of how to firstly set up that tracking using Google Ads and Google Tag Manager, go through and watch this video right here. Or if you want to see the updated version of how you can then Import into Google Analytics 4 Profile, go through and watch this video right here. Once again, thank you for joining me and I look forward to seeing you on one of those two videos right now. See ya.