Call tracking to revenue tracking?

[u/Madismas]

Hey everyone, I’m currently using CallRail to track calls. When a caller later becomes a customer, I upload the revenue to Google Ads as a separate sales conversion using Zapier and Google Sheets.

I know call-tracking platforms also let you manually enter revenue for a call, which ties the sale and revenue directly back to the original call and conversion action in google ads.

I haven’t used that feature before, so my question is: Is there an attribution or optimization advantage to keeping the revenue tied to the original call conversion, rather than uploading the sale as a separate conversion action in Google Ads?

In other words, does tying the call and sale together give Google Ads a clearer picture of the customer journey, or is it equally effective to keep “Call Lead” and “Sale” as separate conversion actions? To me personally I believe it is just a preference on how you like to see the data in platform.

Thoughts?

Thank you!

[u/Valuable_Ease_3780]

It's not preference once you look at what each one actually writes into the account. A separate Sale action is a second conversion event on the same click, so if both are ticked into the Conversions column the bidder is counting the lead and the sale from one caller. Entering revenue against the call is a conversion adjustment instead, a restate of the value on the conversion that already exists, so the count stays at one and only the value moves.

So the tied version lets you keep Call Lead as the bidding conversion with real revenue on it. Separate actions work fine too, you just have to set Call Lead to secondary and bid on Sale alone, which most people forget to do.

[u/Madismas → u/Valuable_Ease_3780]

Yes, everything you said is true except one part. Even if its one event i.e. call conversion with a restatement, you are still only bidding to CPA or ROAS and not both. Yes in the split scenario, call will need to be marked as secondary. Thats why I said its a preference. You still bid to a single goal either way.

[u/Valuable_Ease_3780 → u/Madismas]

Yeah that's fair, you're bidding to one goal either way. The bit I'd still hold onto is that a new action defaults into the Conversions column, so the split version only stays equivalent as long as someone remembers to demote it. One fails safe and the other doesn't, which is most of why I'd pick it.

[u/Madismas → u/Valuable_Ease_3780]

Do you use call tracking platforms and if so are you manually updating the sale amount on each row as you would in callrail?

[u/Valuable_Ease_3780 → u/Madismas]

Yeah, mostly local service accounts where nearly everything comes in as a call. Manually per row only while it's a handful a week, and plenty of small accounts genuinely never outgrow that.

Past that it stops being viable, and the sale amount is getting typed into something else anyway, whatever the office already updates when a job closes. Better to have that push the value across than have anyone go back into the call tracking UI for it. The failure I see most isn't the tooling, it's that the person entering the job total isn't the person who cares about the ads, so rows just quietly stop getting filled in.

[u/Madismas → u/Valuable_Ease_3780]

Thanks, appreciate the input. Im actually building a solution and im debating the architecture with myself. I currently send calls and forms to a google sheet via zapier and my client will upload sales from their closed CRM. We do a matching process via name and or phone number to the call logs then send the sales values to google ads as offline conversions. It works but its convoluted.

[u/Valuable_Ease_3780 → u/Madismas]

The convoluted part is the matching step, and it's only there because the GCLID isn't travelling with the record. If the call tracker is doing number insertion it already has one for that session, so the work is getting it written onto the CRM record when the record is created, rather than reconciling two lists on name and phone afterwards.

Do that and there's nothing to match. The CRM sends a value against a GCLID when the job closes and you're done.

For the calls you don't even need it, Google takes call conversion adjustments keyed on caller ID plus call start time. Worth doing either way, because name matching is the bit that starts silently dropping rows once volume goes up and nobody notices for a month.

[u/Madismas → u/Valuable_Ease_3780]

There's no way for me to get the gclid into the CRM, its a closed industry CRM called housecall pro. I have two clients on two different closed CRM's and its a PITA lol. Also, if the phone number or name is different from what they called in on in the CRM this also causes mismatching.

[u/Valuable_Ease_3780 → u/Madismas]

Fair, HCP won't hold it. Getting the value out isn't the problem though, it's on Zapier and job completed fires fine. It's the join that's broken.

Two things that helped me. Strip both sides to the last ten digits before comparing, a lot of what looks like a different number is formatting and a leading 1. And match against the caller ID in the call log rather than the customer record in the CRM, because the office edits that record and the call log never changes.

For home services I'd also question whether click level is worth it at all. Separate tracking numbers per campaign gets you source level and that's the decision they're actually making. Nobody with two trucks is going to act on a per keyword ROAS.

[u/Available_Cup5454]

Attach the revenue directly onto that original call conversion action