Call and form tracking: which channel each enquiry comes from

At a service business, the customer does not put anything in a basket: they ring or fill in a form. Ask where the enquiries come from and the usual answer is “from the internet”. A call and form tracking system turns that answer into something useful: how many enquiries each ad brings, how many come from ordinary search, how many from the profile on Google Maps, and how many of them turn into contracts.

Without it, the advertising budget is divided up on guesswork. Ad platforms optimise for what they can see, and if they cannot see the calls, they send the money towards the keywords that bring clicks, not customers.

Where calls and enquiries really come from

A call can start straight from the ad (on a phone, ads can have a call button), from the site, from the Google Business Profile or from printed material. Forms come from the site or from the ad platforms’ own forms. Each place is measured differently.

Google Ads can count calls started from ads by itself, where the feature is available for your account, and the Google profile reports how many people pressed the call button. The site needs configuring.

• Paid ads: Google Ads and Meta Ads, with the campaign and the keyword where the platform provides them.
• Organic search: visitors arriving from the ordinary Google results.
• Google Business Profile: calls and clicks through to the site, tagged so they are not confused with other searches.
• Offline sources: leaflets, billboards, stickers, each with its own number.

Tracking numbers: how to find out which ad made the phone ring

A tracking number is an extra phone number that forwards to your usual one and logs every call: when it took place, how long it lasted, whether it was answered. The simple version uses one fixed number per source. The dynamic version automatically changes the number shown on the site according to where the visitor came from, and can tie the call to the campaign and even to the search term.

The service comes from a call tracking provider or from the cloud phone system, if the company has one. Google Ads also has its own forwarding numbers in some countries; whether they are available for your account is checked during setup.

Without tracking numbers, what is left is measuring clicks on the number on the site. It is free and useful, but it shows an intention: you do not know whether the call took place, and anyone who dials the number after reading it off a computer screen does not appear at all.

Forms: the event that counts is a successful submission

The classic mistake is counting presses of the “Send” button. If a required field is empty, the form does not go, but the conversion is recorded anyway. We set the event on the confirmation of submission: the thank-you page or the signal given by the form plugin, picked up through Google Tag Manager and sent to Google Analytics and to the ad platforms.

This is also where the source is dealt with. The form gets hidden fields that are filled in automatically with where the visitor came from: the UTM tags in the link, the ad’s click identifier, the page they arrived on. They are saved together with the enquiry. Spam is filtered out before counting; otherwise the “best” campaigns will be the ones that attract bots.

Call and form tracking linked to the CRM

The number of enquiries is only part of the answer. Two campaigns can bring just as many calls, one from people asking for a serious quote, the other from the merely curious. The difference only shows in the CRM, the software in which the team keeps track of enquiries and the stage each has reached.

We send every enquiry there with its source, and the team marks what became of it: unsuitable, quoted, won. The information can go back to Google Ads as a conversion import: the platform learns which clicks led to contracts and bids for those, not for any form at all. This part depends on people: if the stages are not kept up to date, the chain breaks. Without a CRM, a spreadsheet kept with discipline is a good start.

Call recording and other things to settle at the start

Recording calls helps with training the team, but a recorded conversation contains personal data. It is done only if the caller is informed, through a message played before the call is answered, with a stated purpose, a retention period and limited access. How the message is worded, on what legal basis calls are recorded and how long the files are kept are for the data protection officer to decide.

There are a few more questions we answer together before starting.

• Who answers the phone, and what happens to missed calls?
• Which number appears on the Google profile and in directories? Changed carelessly, it creates contradictory contact details.
• Do the tracking numbers stay with the company if you change provider or agency?
• What do you count as a good enquiry? The definition is written down, so everyone marks them the same way.

This is a typical project description: it shows how we usually approach this kind of work and does not present a project carried out for a particular client. Every real project starts from your company’s situation, and the stages, timescales and price are agreed after the initial discussion.