Attributing web visitors and their phone calls in Google Analytics and Google AdWords can be difficult if you don’t understand how session tracking differs between those platforms and your call tracking provider. Each platform identifies visitors in a different way and, more importantly, identifies a visitor’s conversion(s) separately. These variances can lead to a misunderstanding of the data, including its quality and accuracy. Below is a list of helpful tips to ensure you are analyzing your call data correctly between platforms.
Data as Captured By: A Call Tracking Provider
Whenever a phone call is made to a number hosted on a provider’s platform, that call is logged. The timestamp, caller ID, and user data tied to the call (including the google click ID and Universal Analytics CID) is recorded alongside that call and a conversion is fired into Google Universal Analytics.
Providers like DialogTech, who have a sophisticated integration with Google Universal Analytics, fire the phone call conversion in two ways: as an event and as a custom metric. Due to the ability to fire call conversions from both online and offline (e.g., print ads, billboards, etc.) sources into Google Analytics, every call made to a number on the provider’s platform that is integrated with GA will be sent as a conversion. In the case that the same user calls twice, both call conversions are sent to Google Analytics.
For example, below is a screenshot of call results in a DialogTech account for calls made from visitors who arrived from Google paid ads between January 16th and February 15th.
Notice that there is a total of 322 call records but only 313 unique caller IDs. This signifies that there are 9 calls made by the same caller ID within this timeframe. Let’s move on to Google Analytics and see how they interpret this data.
Data as Captured By: Google Universal Analytics
As stated above, DialogTech will fire these 322 call records into Google Analytics as a custom metric and as an event. The call event is used to create a Google Analytics event goal that will later be imported into Google AdWords. The custom metric will account for ALL calls fired into the Google Analytics platform. In other words, the custom metric should match the total amount of call records captured by DialogTech while the call event (or event goal) should match the total amount of unique caller IDs captured in DialogTech. *Note: the integration between DialogTech and Google Universal Analytics occurs in real time.
To begin viewing the data in Google Analytics, I have created a custom report that incorporates my custom metric:
As you can see, the metric for DialogTech columns on the right-hand side matches the total amount of call records logged during this timeframe. Now let’s take a look at calls as an event goal:
Notice that the total call completions for the event goal are less than the amount of call conversions captured by the custom metric. This is due to how Google Analytics’ attributes multiple conversions of the same event by the same user. Additional conversions of the same event by the same user are not attributed to the event goal. The goal will only count a single goal completion for users that complete the event multiple times within a Google Analytics session, which usually lasts between 30 minutes and 4 hours depending on your settings.
Data as Captured By: Google AdWords
Call conversion quantity in AdWords will never match the number displayed in Google Analytics for a variety of reasons:
- There is a 24-48 hour delay when importing conversion from Google Analytics to AdWords.
- The call tracking provider may have captured the Google Analytics ID assigned to the user but not the Google Click ID. This is likely due to the user calling outside of the session assigned to the visitor by the call tracking provider.
- If your conversion count setting in AdWords is set to “One Conversion,” the conversion imported from GA will be applied to the first conversion the user completed (which may not have been a phone call).
- If you have a short conversion window set in AdWords, this could result in a few conversions not being applied to your campaigns.
Here is the result of the call data above appearing in AdWords:
Notice that the “DialogTech Conversions” column does not match the goal completions captured in GA due to a combination of the reasons stated above.
To learn more about integrating your call tracking data with Google Analytics and AdWords, sign up for a demo today!
