How to track phone calls and form fills from your website

If you run a local business, your website has two jobs: get people to call, and get people to fill in a form. Pageviews don’t pay the bills. Here’s how to count the things that do.

Phone calls

Most calls from a website start with a tap on a phone number. Make sure every phone number on your site is a real link, written as tel: followed by the number. Plain text numbers can’t be tapped on most phones and can’t be tracked.

Plainview counts taps on phone links automatically. Add a goal for “Someone clicks” your number, and you’ll see calls started per day, per page and per traffic source.

Forms

There are two reliable ways to count form submissions. The first is a thank-you page: send people to a page like /thanks after they submit, then add a goal for visits to that page. The second is to count the submit itself, which Plainview does automatically for standard forms.

Thank-you pages are the most reliable, because they only count when the submission actually went through.

Bookings

If you use a booking tool, check whether it can redirect to a page on your site after booking. If it can, count that page as a goal. If it can’t, count clicks on your “Book” button as a softer signal.

Put it together

Once you’re counting calls, forms and bookings, look at conversion rate by traffic source. It’s common to find a small channel that converts at twice the rate of your biggest one. That’s where your next marketing dollar should go.