Conversion tracking is the thing everything else in a Google Ads account depends on. Bidding, budget allocation, which keywords survive. Get it wrong and every other decision in the account is made on bad information.
For a trade business, the conversion is a phone call. Not a click, not a form, not a page view. So the tracking has to see calls.
The three kinds, and which you need
- Calls from ads. Someone taps the call button on the ad itself and never reaches your site. Tracked through the call asset.
- Calls from your website. They click through, read the page, then ring the number on it. This is where most trade calls come from and it's the one people skip.
- Clicks on your number. A tap on a tel: link. Easy to set up and much weaker than the other two, because a tap isn't a conversation.
You want the first two. The third on its own will mislead you.
The duration threshold is the whole thing
Google lets you set how long a call must last to count as a conversion. The default is often 60 seconds. For trades that is usually too long and sometimes too short, and nobody ever revisits it.
This is the single most common misconfiguration I find. An account counting 12 second calls as conversions is an account being optimised toward wrong numbers.
Setting up website call tracking
- In Google Ads, go to Goals, then Conversions, then New conversion action, and pick Phone calls, then Calls from a website.
- Set the call length that counts. Think about your own calls before picking a number.
- Install the Google tag on every page of the site, not just the landing page.
- Add the phone number snippet, which swaps your displayed number for a Google forwarding number when the visitor came from an ad.
- Mark it as a Primary conversion action so it drives bidding. A Secondary action is recorded but ignored by the bidding.
Check it actually works
Don't assume. Click your own ad from a phone that has never been to your site, wait for the page to load, check the number displayed has changed to a forwarding number, then call it and talk past your threshold.
Give it a few hours and look for the conversion in the account. If it isn't there, the tag isn't firing, and everything the account has done since you set it up was guesswork.
Once it's running
Give it 15 to 30 conversions of history, then move the campaign to Maximise Conversions. That's the point at which Google can out-bid your manual guesses, and it's where the cost per click starts falling on its own.
Switching to automated bidding before you have conversion data is the other common mistake. It has nothing to learn from, so it spends freely while it finds out.
Want it run for you? Our Google Ads management is built around tracked calls, not clicks.