How to Set Up and Track Call Conversions on Your Website Using Google Analytics
One of the best aspects of marketing online – as opposed to using paper flyers or real-life billboards – is the ability to track what works with your audience. But despite this huge advantage, many websites don’t utilize tracking beyond the basic Google analytics tracking code.
Depending on your specific website and business model, your actual conversion rate can vary. In this post, we’re going to cover how to add conversion tracking on phone calls on your website.
If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it. – Peter Drucker
For the solutions below, you might need a developer to implement the coding aspect.
Tracking Phone Calls from Your Website
For most businesses, the first thing they want to track is phone call from the website. There are a few ways of handling this, but I’ll be taking you through the setup on Google Analytics. Google analytics can provide not only how many phone calls you received, but also what page they were from, what system the user was on, and integrate them with Google Ads.
Google Analytics Setup for Tracking Call Conversions
In this step, we’ll be adding coding around the phone number so Google can track when people click on it from the website.
First, we’ll add a tiny bit of javascript to the phone number’s link. Anywhere you have the phone number on the site, you want to manually add a link and the following code with your own values.
1 | onclick="ga('send', 'event', 'category', 'label', 'value');" |
so your full link URL will looking something like this (see below for category, label, and values options):
1 |
Let’s walk through that onclick code (use the images below to see how it will show up in Google):
Send & Event: These are the default settings for the function that allows it to send information about this event to Google. Leave these as ‘send’ and ‘event’.
Category: The is the main category type of event. Categorizing by type (ie. Phone Tracking) is a good way of seeing one type of conversion all together. Other options might be contact forms on your site, or Landing Pages.
Label: This is the specific action. Here, I added the action as the Call (Header). I have 1 phone number on my site, but it’s in multiple places. Tracking where they’re clicking on the phone number could be useful.
Value: While my site doesn’t need an additional label here, if you have multiple phone numbers, you can use this to track which phone number users are calling.
Keep in mind that the way I’ve organized the category, actions, and labels, is just one way of organizing the information. How you organize the tracking of events for your website might be different based on your specific needs.
Testing Google’s Event Tracking
Now that the link is set up, go to Google Analytics and sign in and we’ll test it. Go to Real-Time > Events.
Open an incognito browser and try clicking on the phone number you added the coding to. Go back to Google Analytics’s Real-time, and it should now show up under the Events with the settings you added.
Keep in mind a limitation of the phone call event tracking: Just clicking the phone number will trigger an event. But on a computer (mac), it asks you to confirm twice before you actually call the phone number. If the user cancels, the phone call is still tracked as an event.
Setting Up Goals on Google
Once you’ve added the conversions you want, you can set up Goals within Google Analytics.
Within Google Analytics, go to Admin (gear icon on the bottom left) > Goals (far right).
Click the Red Button to Add a New Goal.
Choose “Custom” for the Goal Setup.
Goal Description: Add a title (like Phone Calls), and set the Type to “Event”.
Add the Goal Details using the information you added during the above Conversion Rate Tracking. For example, our category we used was “Phone Call Tracking”. You can track a specific action, label, or value, but you can also simply leave it at the category level. Make sure that whatever you add, it is exactly what you added to the conversion tracking code (category, action, label, or value) or nothing will show up!
You can click “verify goal” to see if this connects with what you have on the site, but keep in mind that if you just added these events to your website, it will warn you that you have a 0% conversion rate for the last 7 days – because the event tracking is new.
Finally, click Save.
Now you’ll see that goal added to your goal list. To view this in the actual analytics, go back to Home (house on the left), go to Conversions > Goals > Overview. You’ll see your new goal pop up right under the line graph.
Adding Google’s Event Tracking Is Easy
While initially event tracking might seem difficult, it’s really just a simple javascript event added wherever a user might click. With a little care, you can set up tracking in a way that can allow you to understand how people are interacting with your site, improve your site structure, and increase your business.
