Your ad budget is leaking through the phone

The arithmetic

Suppose you spend £2,000 a month and generate 100 calls, of which 30 become customers. Your reported cost per customer is about £67.

Now suppose 25 of those 100 calls actually rang out. You bought 100 opportunities and used 75. Had they all been answered at the same conversion rate you would have won 40, and your cost per customer would have been £50.

The £17 difference is not a rounding error. It is a third of your acquisition cost, and it is invisible in the platform because Google reports the click and the call, not whether a human spoke.

Why ad calls are especially likely to be missed

Advertising runs at all hours unless you schedule it, and people click at all hours. If your ads run in the evening and your phone does not, you are buying calls into an empty room.

Ad driven callers are also less patient. They have no relationship with you, arrived from a list of alternatives, and can return to the results page in one tap.

How to check yours

Use call reporting or a tracking number on your paid campaigns specifically, then compare calls generated with calls answered. Do it for a fortnight, including evenings and weekends.

Cross reference the unanswered ones against the hours your ads were running. If ads run 24 hours and the phone runs nine to five, the gap is the leak.

The two ways to close it

Restrict ad scheduling to the hours you can answer. This is the cheap fix and it works, but it also hands the evening entirely to competitors, and evenings are when a lot of high intent searching happens.

Or answer the calls. Then keep the ads running and stop paying for silence, which also improves the return on every other channel that generates calls.

One more thing worth checking

Look at whether your ads point to a page whose phone number is easy to tap on a phone. A surprising number of local service ads send mobile traffic to a page where the number is an image, or three scrolls down.