Determine Tracking Number Allocation

Setting Up Enough Tracking Numbers

For offline ads, tracking number allocation is pretty straightforward: you set up a tracking number for each offline ad you want to track down to the granularity you need to make informed decisions. For example, for TV ads, you could have just 1 phone number for all of your TV ads with one source named “TV,” or you may consider allocating specific tracking numbers mapped to specific sources for different ads on different stations at different times, so you can assess the performance of each.  It is easy to add or remove tracking numbers at any time, and you can create as many tracking sources as you need.

Read more about tracking number guidelines for offsite sources.

For online ads, it is a little more complicated. As visitors come to your website, we dynamically show them a tracking number associated with that advertising channel. Each time the tracking number is called, we attempt to match a website visitor to the call. If too many website visitors are seeing the same tracking number at once, it becomes harder for our system to discern which one is the right visitor to match.

We highly recommend a ratio of 1 tracking number for every 20 visits a day coming to your website from a particular advertising channel.

If you have 100 unique visitors a day from Google Ads to your website, then you should have 5 tracking numbers associated with the source Google Ads. The system will rotate those 5 numbers to visitors across the day. The system remembers which tracking number each visitor saw and it will continue to show that same number to them each time they come back to your website.

You can get your daily visitor volume for each channel from Google Analytics and then begin to set up your tracking numbers. 

Read more about tracking number guidelines for onsite sources and how they affect likelihood scores.

Monitoring Allocation Going Forward

Your traffic volume through channels is likely going to change over time. We provide several ways to keep an eye on your tracking number allocation to ensure you have enough numbers to accurately match website visitors to each of your calls.

Visitor Detail:

• As each call comes in, there will be a visitor matched to it.

1. In the Call Log, you can view the details of the visitor by clicking the bar chart in the lower right corner of the visitor detail cell of each call.
2. After clicking the bar chart, you will see the website visitor details and will have the option to check for Other Sessions.
3. We match the visitor with the highest likelihood score to the call, but this panel allows you to override that selection and use a different visitor for the call rather than the one the system matched. Click use next to any of the lower-likelihood visitors you want to use instead.
The do not use is helpful if you are testing and visiting your website so that your visit does not get attributed to that caller.

4. From here, you can also select Check Analytics to see whether an Event has been created in Google Analytics.

5. Go to Reports →Accuracy Report to see an overview of the likelihood scores for your calls along with recommendations of how many tracking numbers you need to add to bring up your scores.

Typically, you want at least a 90% likelihood score for each source.
You can adjust the settings in your account to only match visitors that have at least a certain likelihood to avoid potentially incorrect matches being made. This is done by going to Numbers→ Tracking Code→ Visitor Call Analytics. By default, the system shows any match at 5% or greater, but you can adjust this.