Question from Reddit user:
Hey!
I am looking for a way to track conversions by phone. There are two ways to make a reservation: the online system on the website (which we track correctly) and a call to the administrator. The problem is that when simply tracking calls, we received 70-80% of irrelevant inquiries, which distorted the data and drained the budget. We want to track only those calls as conversions that the administrator has qualified and confirmed as real bookings in our CRM system, from which the event can be transferred to Google Ads or manually.
The ideal scenario: the user clicks on the ad, calls, the administrator makes the booking and enters it into the CRM, after which the CRM sends an offline conversion event to Google.
Question: What is the best technical implementation for this? Is it necessary to use third-party call tracking to capture GCLID and transfer it to CRM, or is there a simpler solution using Google tools? How can I correctly link an ad click to a final booking that has been manually confirmed?
Answer from Nabil:
The short answer is:
The ideal scenario you described requires a closed-loop system that reliably connects the initial ad click to the final, qualified booking in your CRM, and the simplest, most effective technical implementation for this is to use a dedicated Call Tracking Platform like CallRail combined with Google Ads Offline Conversion Tracking.
You absolutely need a third-party call tracking tool to capture the crucial Google Click ID (gclid) at the moment of the call and pass it to your CRM.
The subsequent transfer of the qualified booking event back to Google Ads should then be handled via the Google Ads API from your CRM or a server-side tagging environment.
The long answer is:
Since you need to track only qualified calls – those resulting in a confirmed booking – you must track the full user journey from the Google ad click to the final administrator qualification in the CRM.
Standard Google Ads call extensions or website call conversions can only track a phone call as an event but cannot distinguish between an irrelevant inquiry and a real booking, which is why your data is being distorted.
The core technical challenge is reliably capturing the Google Click ID (gclid) for the phone call, which is the unique identifier created by Google Ads auto-tagging.
The solution involves three stages: Capture, Storage, and Upload.
For the Capture and Storage stages, a third-party call tracking provider like CallRail is necessary because it provides Dynamic Number Insertion (DNI).
DNI automatically replaces the phone number on your website with a unique, session-specific tracking number.
When a user calls that number, the call tracking platform simultaneously records the call details and, most importantly, correlates it with the gclid that was present in the user’s URL or stored in a cookie.
This gclid and other call details (like the caller’s phone number and the unique Call ID) are then instantly pushed into your CRM and associated with the new or existing contact record.
The Google Tag Manager component helps ensure the gclid is correctly captured on the website and persisted in a cookie, making it available for the DNI script.
Once the administrator qualifies the call as a real booking and updates the status in your CRM, the final stage, Upload, begins.
Your CRM cannot natively speak to Google Ads; it needs an intermediary.
This is where the Google Ads API comes in.
You should set up an automated script or utilize a server-side tagging solution like Stape or Google Cloud Platform to periodically query your CRM for new, qualified bookings that have a valid gclid.
This script then uses the Google Ads API to send an Offline Conversion event back to Google Ads, using the gclid as the key to attribute the conversion to the original ad click.
This process ensures only confirmed, high-value bookings are recorded as conversions in Google Ads, providing accurate data to optimize your bidding and budget allocation.
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