Call tracking
call reporting / forwarding number / dynamic number insertion / tracking number
Call tracking replaces the phone number shown to a visitor with a substitute number that routes to your real one. Only calls dialed through that substitute are measured. Google assigns a forwarding number when call reporting is on, and Microsoft requires an ad group to have reached 10 clicks and 10 dollars of spend in 30 days.
Both platforms describe the same trick in almost the same words. Microsoft calls its version a forwarding phone number, defined as a unique phone number that is routed to your business phone number. Google says that when call reporting is turned on, a Google forwarding number is assigned to your ad. Nothing is installed on your phone system. A different number is displayed, and it points at you.
That substitution is the whole mechanism, and it is also the whole limit. The platform can report on a call because the call passed through a number it issued. Any call that reached you another way never touched it.
What gets recorded is more detailed than people expect. Google lists call duration, call start time, whether the call was connected, and the caller's phone number for calls longer than fifteen seconds, with India excepted. Microsoft describes reports covering details like call duration and missed calls on all calls your ads generated.
The conditions attached are the part nobody mentions in a pitch. Microsoft states that to get a forwarding number, an ad group in a campaign using call extensions must have at least 10 clicks and 10 dollars in spend in the last 30 days, and that call forwarding is only available in specific markets, naming Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States. A feature you have switched on is not necessarily a feature you have.
In practice
This is why the call report and the phone bill disagree, and neither is lying. Somebody who saved your number last year, read it off a van, or found it somewhere the substitution never reached, dials the real line. That call happened, it was worth money, and it is correctly absent from a report that only ever claimed to describe calls through one specific number.
Not the same as
- Call recording
- A separate thing with its own consent rules. Tracking who called and for how long does not mean anyone recorded it.
- A conversion
- A tracked call is an event. Whether it counts as a conversion depends on how the conversion action is configured.
Why it matters to you
Phone calls are how a lot of businesses actually get work, and they are the part of measurement most often either ignored or overstated. The useful question about any call report is not how many calls it shows. It is which calls could possibly have appeared in it. Once you know the answer is only the ones through the substituted number, the gap between the report and reality stops being alarming and starts being measurable.
What to ask or check
- 01Which of our numbers are substituted, and which are printed somewhere untracked?
- 02Does our ad group meet the platform's thresholds for getting a forwarding number at all?
- 03When someone quotes a call count, is it calls received or calls through the tracking number?
What people get wrong
That switching it on measures your phone calls. It measures calls placed to a number the platform issued, which is a subset of the calls your business receives.
Red flags
- A call count presented as total calls received.
- Call tracking reported as live on a campaign that cannot meet the platform's thresholds for a forwarding number.
- Printed or saved numbers nobody has accounted for when the report is compared to reality.
Who owns it
The advertising account issues the number, so whoever manages the account controls what is measurable. Numbers printed elsewhere in the business are outside it by construction.
Where you will see it
In call assets and call ads, in call reporting columns, and in any conversation about why the phone rang more than the dashboard says.