Measuring an Ad That Produces a Phone Call

The gap

An advertising report can tell you exactly how many people clicked and what it cost.

It cannot tell you that the phone rang, unless the number was tapped on the site or in the ad itself.

Which for a trade is the majority of the response, and it means the campaign appears to produce far less than it does.

Businesses have stopped campaigns that were genuinely working, on the evidence of a report that could only ever see part of the outcome.

The four methods

• Tap on the number, recorded as a conversion.
• Asking every caller, and writing it down.
• Comparing periods, with and without advertising.
• A tracked number, which attributes calls precisely.

The first two together cover most of what a small business needs and cost nothing beyond attention.

The fourth is precise, costs a monthly fee, and introduces a dependency worth considering carefully.

Counting the tap

The cheapest partial answer, and it should be set up before anything else.

A tap on a telephone link is a recordable event, and marking it as a conversion means the campaign report includes it.

It is not a completed call. Some people tap and hang up, and some tap twice.

It is a strong statement of intent, it is countable, and it has a trend, which converts the phone from invisible to partly visible.

For a mobile-heavy local campaign it frequently captures a substantial share of the actual response.

Asking, and actually recording it

The most accurate method available and the one requiring most discipline.

Ask every caller how they found you, and write the answer in the same place every time.

The answers are imprecise, since people say the internet or Google when they mean something more specific, and they are still the best evidence available.

What makes this work is doing it consistently rather than occasionally, because a partial record produces a misleading proportion.

Thirty answers is enough to see the pattern clearly, and a year of them is enough to make real decisions on.

A worked example

A trade business whose campaign report showed a small number of form conversions and a cost per conversion that looked poor.

They were on the point of stopping it.

Before doing so they added phone tap tracking and began asking every caller.

Within two months the picture had changed: taps outnumbered form submissions considerably, and a proportion of callers named the advertisement directly.

The real cost per enquiry was well below what the report had suggested, and the campaign was comfortably viable.

Nothing about the advertising had changed. Only the measurement had, and the decision it would have produced was the wrong one.

Comparing periods

The crude method that requires nothing and works surprisingly well.

Count total enquiries during weeks with advertising and weeks without.

The difference is a rough measure of what advertising contributes, including everything the reports cannot see.

It is confounded by season, weather and everything else happening, which means it needs several cycles rather than one comparison.

For a business that pauses advertising seasonally anyway, the comparison is available without doing anything deliberate.

Call tracking, and its costs

The precise option, presented fairly.

A dedicated number shown only in advertising routes through a service, records the source, and connects the call normally.

What it gives: accurate attribution of calls to campaigns, and in some setups to specific searches.

What it costs: a monthly fee, a number differing from the one on your van and your invoices, and reliance on a third party for your main enquiry route.

That last point deserves weight for a business whose phone is everything. A service outage is a day of no enquiries.

Worth it for substantial advertising spend where attribution decisions involve real money. Rarely worth it below that.

Call extensions

A feature worth using, since it removes a step entirely.

An ad can carry the phone number directly, so somebody can call without visiting the site at all.

Those calls are recorded by the platform, which means they appear in the report without any additional setup.

Which makes it the one route where the phone response is visible by default, and it is frequently left switched off.

The trade-off is that a caller who never saw the site has less information, so the call is more likely to be a price question and less likely to be a considered enquiry.

For an urgent service that is exactly right, and for a considered purchase the site visit is worth keeping in the path.

The counter-case

Where the phone problem does not apply.

A business whose enquiries arrive predominantly by form, which is more common in professional services than in trades.

An online shop, where the transaction is on the site and fully recorded.

And a business small enough that the owner speaks to everybody and simply knows, which is a genuine answer rather than a failure to measure.

The gap matters most for a local trade advertising to a mobile audience, which is exactly the situation where it is largest.

What the caller heard first

A limitation of every method here worth stating plainly.

Somebody who saw an ad, then searched the business name a week later, then phoned, will usually say they found you on Google.

Which is true and it credits the search rather than the advertisement that caused it.

No small-business measurement resolves that, and the practical response is asking a second question: whether they had heard of you before.

Those two answers together give a rough sense of what created the awareness against what captured it, which is as far as this goes without expensive tooling.

Setting it up

1. Make the number a proper telephone link.
2. Record taps as a conversion.
3. Import that into the campaign reporting.
4. Start asking every caller.
5. Write the answers in one place.
6. Wait three months before judging the campaign.

The first is worth checking rather than assuming, since a number rendered as plain text cannot be tapped and therefore cannot be counted at all, and a surprising number of sites still render it that way.

When to act on those numbers is covered in knowing when to turn it off.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.