Viewing calls in Google Analytics

Once you have integrated Google Analytics with your Call Tracking account, an event is sent to Google Analytics at the end of each call.

In this article, you will see how to display the events related to your phone calls in your reports. In order to get more accurate data, you can also create specific goals to complete with events, for calls on one or more specific tracking numbers.

Content summary here:

• How to view your events
• How to define a goal in Google Analytics
• How to view goal completions (for all your calls, by tracking number or by Source/Medium)

How to view your events

As defined by Google Analytics, an event stands for an interaction with any content that can be measured apart from a visit or a display of a Web page. This includes downloads, clics on links, and of course phone calls.

To view your events in Google Analytics, get to Behaviour section and click on Events, and then on Top Events. Each call received on a tracking number sends to Google Analytics an event that belongs to the Phone category.

This report can also give you the call status: answered or missed. To display the call status, add Event Action as secondary dimension to the report.

The detailed structure of events sent to Google Analytics for phone calls is available in your Call Tracking account.

How to define goals in Google Analytics

You can define goals related to event completions in Google Analytics, to collect even more accurate data about the phone contacts generated by your website.

When you create a goal for inbound calls in Google Analytics, each event sent for a call you receive is considered as your new goal’s completion. Then, you only have to select this goal in your reports to deepen your data for this goal’s completions.

Here is how to proceed to define a goal in Google Analytics:

1. In your account, get to Admin, at the bottom left of the screen;
2. Then click on the Goals button in the View sidebar on the left;
3. Create a new goal by clicking on the top-left red button;
4. In Goal setup, select Custom;
5. In Goal description, give your new goal a name (e.g. Phone conversions, Phone calls, …);
6. Select the goal slot ID to better structure your goals in Google Analytics;
7. Select Event as Goal type;
8. Click on Continue;
9. In the next step of the form, define Category as follows: Equal to – Phone;
10. Save your goal.

How to view goal completions

Now you can view your phone calls as events, and also as goal completions.

Get back to Conversions, then Goals and Overview. To see only the data related to your goal, select it in the dropdown menu above the report.

Viewing calls by tracking number in Google Analytics

In your Google Analytics account, you can also view event and goal completion reports only for one or several specific tracking numbers.

To view your received calls for a specific tracking number, some complementary information is required while setting a goal in Google Analytics. The process remains the same.

1. In the Admin tab, get to Goals and select an existing goal or create a new one;
2. In Goal details, define Action (below Category) as follows : Regular expression – Characters contained in the naming of the tracking number(s);
3. Save your updates.

In the following example, the goal is defined to complete each time a call is received on tracking numbers whose naming contains the characters Garage:

Then, to define a goal for one specific tracking number, type in the Action field the full name of this number, as it shows up in your Call Tracking account. It must be defined as Regular Expression.

Viewing calls by Source/Medium

Once you have activated dynamic number insertion in your Call Tracking account, your inbound calls can be displayed by Source/Medium in Google Analytics.

To do this, get to Acquisition, then to All Traffic and Source/Medium.

This data can also be found in Channels report (Default Grouping Channels), regarding the defined Source/Medium.

How Source/Medium works with tracking numbers

When setting a traffic source for a tracking number with DNI, the Source/Medium parameter completes the event sent to Google Analytics at every call you receive.

In the table below, you will find which Source / Medium parameters can be sent to Google Analytics, depending on the traffic source defined in the tracking number edition form:

*: When you define URL parameters as traffic source, the Source/Medium matches the values you set as utm_source and utm_medium in URL parameters.