How to Track Phone Calls from Google Ads (Step by Step)

Why call tracking matters

Many people call instead of filling in a form, especially for urgent services. If your Google Ads account only counts form submissions, it ignores a large share of your leads. That makes good campaigns look unprofitable and pushes automated bidding in the wrong direction.

The three ways calls happen

Step-by-step setup

1. Add a call asset to your campaigns with your business number, and turn on call reporting where available.
2. Create a "calls from ads" conversion in Google Ads and set a minimum call length, commonly 60 seconds.
3. Create a "calls to a phone number on your website" conversion and add the snippet to your site so the number swaps for ad visitors.
4. Track phone link clicks as a secondary conversion, since a click is not always a completed call.
5. Test it by clicking your own ad from a phone (then pausing the test) or by visiting with a test parameter, and confirm conversions appear.
6. Set primary vs. secondary actions so bidding optimises for real calls and forms, not just clicks.

If you use a CRM such as GoHighLevel, its call tracking numbers can also record calls and send lead source data to Google Ads.

Go further: import booked jobs

Not every call is a customer. The strongest setups record which calls and forms became booked jobs in your CRM, then send that back to Google Ads as an offline conversion. Google can then optimise toward the calls that turn into revenue, not just calls.

This is the core of our conversion tracking service, and a common gap we find in a Google Ads audit.

Common mistakes

• Counting every phone link click as a lead.
• No minimum call length, so 5-second calls count.
• Tracking calls in Google Analytics but not importing them into Google Ads.
• Showing the same number everywhere, so you cannot tell which calls came from ads.
• Nobody answering during ad hours, which wastes paid calls.