Google can now track when your online clicks lead to phone calls

Companies can already find out when people click their ads on Google and then call a business. But when a person clicks and ad and then explores a bunch of pages on a company’s website and then makes a call hours later, that’s a whole other thing. Google couldn’t track that — until now.

Today Google announced the availability of this new feature on its Google Adwords service.

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“Website call conversions dynamically inserts a Google forwarding number on your website that measures the calls made by these customers,” AdWords product manager Anurag Agrawal wrote in a blog post on the new tool.

“Whether they click on the number or dial it directly from their phone, you can attribute the call conversion and conversion value back to the keyword and ad that drove the customer.”

The move makes plenty of sense, as so much of Google’s revenue comes from ads. Google wants to provide better visibility into the power and effectiveness of ads. Exploration of websites and then calling after clicking an ad is a very real process that Google really ought to be able to track.

A few companies using the new feature are already finding it useful.

“Prior to website call conversions, we didn’t have the ability to track ROI when prospects clicked through our ads and called our sales center,” Elan Hasson, digital marketing and information manager at People’s Trust Insurance, said in a canned statement for the blog post.

“Website call conversions has enabled us to better attribute lead and sales activity to the correct AdWords campaign after seeing a 79 percent increase in the total calls attributed to AdWords.”

Setting up the feature is a matter of adding some code to the website. That action automatically sets up Google forwarding numbers for ad clicks.