After launching my first Call Only Campaign, I realized I wasn’t sure about the reporting…was a click a call in these cases? What was a conversion? A few weeks in, and the client I was testing it on was getting what seemed to be good results, if we were going by clicks…but almost too good.
I took to Twitter to ask AdWords to clarify:
Based on this, it sounds like your clicks = calls, so a metric CPC is really your cost per call, and your CTR is really like your conversion rate.
Alas, this was not to be, as Liz, another friendly Twitter user gave some additional insight via a conversation with her rep:
So, what does this mean?
It means that reporting can be a little misleading, and you need to understand how you define conversions with Call Only Campaigns. We’ll use my Call Only test client as an example. Here are their stats for a little over a week:
Based on Google’s initial response to me, that would mean he’d gotten 33 calls. I’d love for that to be true, but it felt overly optimistic.
When we take Liz’s input into account, it makes more sense. It would mean there were basically 33 actions, including calls, and folks who hit “cancel.”
Naturally, this then makes you wonder what’s defined as a “converted click” in this instance.
The Call Details Report
You may have used this in the past, but if not, it’s a good report to know. You can find it under the Dimensions tab as one of the view options. Pulling this paints a very different picture:
Hmm. That’s only 8 calls total, which makes you wonder about the 33 that Google counted. It also might make you wonder…hey, what’s that ONE converted click that was showing up in reporting? (As an aside, this account noted 2 conversions, which will make sense as we go to the next step.)
This is where your Conversions tab will come in handy. When you set up a Call Only campaign, Google will default to counting a call as a conversion if it lasts longer than 60 seconds. This is why my account showed 2 conversions total, and this aligns with the Call Detail report we saw above that has two calls at the 60 second mark.
Defining Conversions on Your Terms
If 60 seconds doesn’t do it for you, you can adjust the call length on the conversion’s details to be whatever you want.
You could get really fancy and set up more than one conversion if you wanted to, where you have several that mark anything where the calls go through (i.e., maybe it’s a call that lasts at least 10 seconds) versus those that likely led to a sale. Sometimes that can help give you call into which are high-volume call drivers vs. what their quality is, in a way that’s easier to digest than the Call Details report.
Hopefully this helps clarify some of the metrics and definitions around reporting your Call Only campaigns. Have you tried them yet?
