Tracking phone leads with Google Voice

When you are working with a company on a private lead generation campaign, the company will sometimes need to receive the leads by phone calls.  Obviously its much easier to track online leads, but call tracking is not as hard as you might think.  There a variety of paid services available to track and log phone leads, but now you can do it for free with Google Voice.

Here are the steps to track phone leads with Google Voice

1.  Set up a Google Voice account for the campaign.  The phone number you choose is the one you will advertise in your ads.

2.  Set up the forwarding number to the business.  This will automatically forward calls from the Google number to the business phone.  You can also set up groups if the business has multiple phone numbers or departments to take the lead calls.   Be sure you turn off call screening so the call goes right through.  Your call conversion rate will drop if customers have to listen to the Google Voice prompts.  You want a seamless call for the end user.

3.  Start the campaign.  The company will now get their calls directly from the ads, and you can track each call from your computer in your Google Voice account.  Each call will generate a log entry in your call history section along with the time, date.  Each entry is essentially a conversion.  Assign your CPA price for each call.  Then you can export this for your reports and billing invoices for the customer.

Some businesses might want to use the voicemail option after hours to capture calls when no one is on staff to answer the phone.  Those can be transcribed and read from the Google Voice panel.   You can do things like offer the customer a reduced CPA rate for voicemail calls to still capture some revenue on those leads.

This might not be the most robust method as far as analytics, but its a solid way to track all calls generated from an ad for billing purposes.  You don’t have to rely on a busy company to track their incoming calls manually and report to you the totals.  The data is all in your control from your Google Voice account.  Best of all, its free!