How Can I Track Website Phone Calls Through Google Analytics?

If taking phone calls from customers is really important for your business, then you’ll want to make sure that you’re logging as much data as you can on every phone call that you receive. This includes where they come from, how long they last, and whether or not they convert.

Without this data, you will find it hard to make impactful, positive changes to your marketing strategy.

As part of your A/B testing, you might also be creating duplicate pages with some changes to see which converts best. And if you’re not doing this already, then you should be!

A question that you might have been wondering in this case is if you can still accurately track incoming phone calls that separates both sources when you are running two pages together. Yes, you can!

Let’s walk you through how you can do so using Google Analytics or Tag Manager so that your data is all in one easy-to-access location.

What phone calls can be tracked?

The first important thing to know is what phone calls can actually be tracked. Fortunately, you can track pretty much any call that your business might receive from an online source, you’ll just have to use different methods for each one.

In this article, we’re going to mainly discuss tracking calls coming directly from your site and recording them through events and goals in Google Analytics.

It’s also important to know that if you are using an external tool to monitor your phone calls then you can import this data into Google Analytics to view alongside your other data.

Track calls from a website

Tracking calls from your website is pretty simple if you know your way around Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager.

To track calls, you can set up an event in Analytics that will record when visitors to your site click on your phone number (or an equivalent button). There are two ways that you can do this: do it manually using an event code, or use Google Tag Manager. We highly recommend using Tag Manager as a quicker, simpler, and more straightforward way of setting up your events.

When you have installed Tag Manager to your site, the process is as simple as navigating to the Tags tab, selecting ‘New’, and then filling in your desired information. We’ll show you what our event looks like as an example.

Your trigger information will be important to help you track your phone calls precisely. For example, our trigger fires when a URL is clicked that has the RegEx ‘tel:’ in the back end, which is how our phone number is coded.

(You can find out more about the power of RegEx here.)

With your Tag Manager linked to your Analytics account, you will be able to see your phone call events presented alongside the rest of your data.

One thing to note is that Analytics only tracks the button clicks from the button on your website. This means that if you want to record other elements such as call length then you will need to use a different method to do so.

Using Google Optimise

One potential headache that you may have with tracking phone calls is when you want to A/B test on your site. For example, you may want to create a page that has a different template or different user journey and see whether this affects your conversion rate (conversions being phone calls in this scenario).

Well, you can still do this provided that you use Google Optimise. We highly recommend using Google Optimise when performing A/B tests anyway because of how good it is and how easy it is to use.

What you want to do is create an A/B test experience where you run your target pages together on Google Optimise. This will be linked to your Analytics account and therefore set up to track your phone call events.

Google Optimise will then record data over your chosen timeframe and present the data clearly next to each page. This way you will see precisely how many conversions you experienced during your experiment and the calculated conversion rate.

Why do I need to track my phone calls?

Now you know how to track any phone calls to your business that come through your website, but what should you do with this data?

Well, the best practice is to track data on all inbound visitors to your site. This data is the bedrock of your digital strategy because you can see where different parts of your business are working or where they are lagging behind. I.e., organic visitors vs paid visitors.

Another reason why you should track your phone call data is to make informed decisions regarding your marketing structure. By knowing what pages have the best conversion rates and why, you know what pages or page elements to push and what ones to avoid in the future.

The good thing is if you are working in marketing then this data is great to present in an easily digestible report: “this page made us more money than the other one. Let’s make more pages like this in the future”. And you can use this method for any part of your business, such as with your Google Ads campaigns.

Track your data with Blaze Media

At Blaze Media, we make sure to track all relevant site data for our clients and present this in a monthly report. We also encourage our clients to allow us to make regular changes to their content in an effort to increase their conversion rates.

If you would like to get started working towards a successful data-led campaign with one of the best digital marketing agencies in the North West, then please get in touch with us here at Blaze Media and we can schedule a free consultation with you.