Hi there,
Thanks for reaching out! Happy to give you some initial thoughts and guidance on your call campaign.
Your question is a good one, but to be brutally honest, the path you're heading down—tracking clicks on a 'Call Now' button—is probably the fastest way to waste your entire ad budget. It's a classic mistake that feels right but is fundamentally flawed. It measures the wrong thing, and tells Facebook's algorithm to find you the worst possible audience.
Let's unpack why that is, and what you should be doing instead to get calls that actually turn into customers.
TLDR;
- Tracking 'Call Now' button clicks is a vanity metric. A click is not a call, and the algorithm will optimise for cheap clickers, not actual callers, wasting your ad spend.
- The proper way to track calls is with a third-party tool using Dynamic Number Insertion (DNI). This tracks actual phone calls and allows you to feed that data back to Facebook as an offline conversion, so the algorithm optimises for real results.
- Call campaigns often attract low-quality, price-shopping leads. For most businesses, a lead form or appointment booking funnel will generate far better qualified prospects, even if the cost per lead seems higher at first.
- The most important advice is to question if a call campaign is even the right strategy. You need to align your campaign objective with your business goals, not just the easiest action to track.
- This letter includes a flowchart visualising the right vs. wrong tracking setup and an interactive calculator to compare the business impact of different lead types.
We'll need to look at why tracking clicks is a terrible idea...
Right, let's get straight into it. When you set up a conversion event on a 'Call Now' button click, you're telling the Meta Pixel, "Hey, every time someone taps this button, count it as a success!" On the surface, it seems logical. But here’s the problem: a click is not a call.
Think about the user journey. Someone sees your ad, clicks through to your landing page. They might accidentally tap the call button while scrolling on their phone. They might click it, see the number pop up in their dialer, and then change their mind. They might get distracted by a notification. In all these scenerios, the Pixel fires, your Ads Manager reports a "conversion," and you get a nice little dopamine hit. But your phone never rang. Not once.
The real danger here isn't just inaccurate reporting. It’s what you're teaching the algorithm. By optimising for button clicks, you're commanding Facebook's powerful AI to go and find more people who are likely to click that button. It will dutifully go and find you an audience of "happy clickers"—people who tap on things impulsively but have little to no real intent to buy. You are actively paying the platform to find you the wrong people. Your cost per "conversion" (the click) might look cheap, but your actual cost per customer will be astronomical because none of them are converting in the real world. It's like judging the success of a shop by how many people peer through the window, not how many come in and spend money. It's a total vanity metric that will lead you to make terrible decisions about your advertising budget.
This is one of the most common pitfalls I see when auditing new client accounts. It’s an easy trap to fall into, but it’s critical you understand this distinction before you spend another pound.
I'd say you need to track calls the proper way...
So, how do the professionals do it? The only reliable method for tracking phone call conversions from ads is using a dedicated call tracking platform with a feature called Dynamic Number Insertion (DNI).
Here’s how it works in simple terms:
- You sign up for a service like CallRail, WhatConverts, or Ruler Analytics.
- You place a small snippet of their code on your website.
- When a user arrives on your landing page from a Facebook ad, the code magically swaps out your regular business phone number for a unique, trackable phone number.
- When the user calls that unique number, the call tracking platform records it and, crucially, attributes it directly back to the specific Facebook campaign and ad that brought them there.
Now, you have real data. You know exactly how many phone calls your campaign generated, not just how many button clicks. But it gets better. These platforms can then send this data back to Facebook using its Offline Conversions API. This is the absolute key. Now, you can tell Facebook's algorithm, "Don't optimise for clicks. Optimise for these actual phone calls." The algorithm now has real-world success data to work with and will start searching for users who are demographically and behaviourally similar to the people who have already called you. This is how you build a truly effective and scalable call campaign.
As for your second question about call recording, these platforms all have that built-in. You can listen back to calls to qualify them, identify trends in what customers are asking for, and even analyse which keywords or ad copy leads to the most valuable conversations. It’s a level of insight that simple click tracking could never provide.
To make this clearer, I've mapped out the two different user journeys.
Path 1: The Wrong Way (Optimising for Clicks)
Path 2: The Right Way (Optimising for Calls)
You probably should question if a call campaign is right for you...
Now that we've covered the 'how', let's take a step back and address the 'why'. Is a call campaign even the best strategy for your business? To be honest, for most businesses, the answer is often no.
Call campaigns excel in one specific area: capturing urgent, immediate-need demand. Think emergency plumbers, locksmiths, or breakdown services. If my basement is flooding, I'm not filling out a lead form; I'm calling the first number I can find. I remember one campaign we worked on for an HVAC company in a competitive market, and for them, calls made sense for their emergency repair service. But even then, they were seeing costs of around $60 per lead because the competition is fierce.
For most other services, especially those that involve a considered purchase, driving people to a phone call is often a poor strategy. Here's why:
- Low Lead Quality: People who call directly from an ad are often price shopping. They're looking for a quick quote and will call three of your competitors right after you. They are less likely to be loyal, high-value customers.
- Operational Headaches: You have to be ready to answer the phone. Every missed call is ad spend literally thrown away. Can you or your team commit to answering every single call instantly during the hours your ads are running? If not, you're setting yourself up for failure.
- No Pre-Qualification: When the phone rings, you have zero information about the person on the other end. You don't know their budget, the specifics of their problem, or their timeline. You have to spend the first five minutes just gathering basic info that a form could have collected for you.
Instead of forcing a call, you should consider a funnel that qualifies prospects and captures their information, giving you control over the sales process.
You'll need to build a proper lead generation funnel...
For almost any service business that isn't dealing with literal emergencies, a lead form or an appointment booking funnel will outperform a direct call campaign in terms of customer quality and eventual ROI. It might feel like adding extra steps, but these 'extra steps' are what filter out the time-wasters and deliver qualified prospects to your sales team.
1. The Lead Form Funnel: This is the workhorse of B2B and considered B2C services. The flow is simple: Ad -> Landing Page -> Lead Form -> Thank You Page. On the lead form, you ask a few key qualifying questions. For a marketing agency, it might be "What is your monthly marketing budget?". For a home renovator, "What is your desired project start date?". This simple act of asking questions does two things: it gives you valuable information before you even speak to them, and it makes the prospect invest a small amount of effort, which weeds out the un-serious enquiries.
2. The Appointment Booking Funnel: This is even better. The flow is Ad -> Landing Page -> Calendar Booking Tool (like Calendly) -> Thank You Page. This is the ultimate qualifier. Someone who is willing to look at your calendar and book a specific time to speak with you is a very warm lead. You've moved from chasing them to them committing time in their own diary to talk. This dramatically improves show-up rates and sales conversations.
Yes, your cost per lead (CPL) on a form submission or a booked meeting will almost certainly be higher than your cost per 'call button click'. But that's the whole point. You're paying more for a much, much better lead. Let's look at the maths.
Call Campaign Inputs
Lead Form Campaign Inputs
Play around with the sliders. You'll quickly realise that a cheap lead is often the most expensive lead you can get. Focusing on lead quality over lead quantity is the only sustainable way to grow a business with paid advertising.
This is the main advice I have for you:
So, to bring this all together, here's the action plan I would recommend you follow. It involves pausing your current idea and rethinking the entire strategy from the ground up, focusing on business outcomes instead of easy-to-track vanity metrics.
| Step | Action | Rationale |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Strategy Pivot | Pause the 'call campaign' idea immediately. Define your ideal customer and decide if you need urgent, low-quality enquiries or considered, high-quality prospects. | Aligning your advertising strategy with your actual business needs is the most important first step. The wrong goal guarantees wasted spend. |
| 2. Build Funnel | Build a high-converting landing page with a clear offer and either a lead capture form or an embedded calendar for booking meetings. | This creates a system for pre-qualifying leads, capturing their data, and filtering out time-wasters before you ever speak to them. |
| 3. Conversion Tracking | Install the Meta Pixel on your website and landing page. Create a Custom Conversion event that fires on the 'Thank You' page after a form submission or meeting booking. | This provides accurate, reliable conversion data to the algorithm, allowing it to optimise for the actual business outcome you want. |
| 4. Campaign Setup | Create a new campaign in Facebook Ads using the 'Leads' objective. Set your optimisation goal to the Custom Conversion you created in the previous step. | This tells the algorithm to find users who are most likely to complete the form or book a meeting, not just click a link. |
| 5. If You MUST Use Calls | If your business model absolutely requires immediate calls, invest in a proper call tracking tool (e.g., CallRail). Implement DNI and set up Offline Conversion uploads to Facebook. | This is the only professional way to run a call campaign. It ensures you're optimising for real calls, not worthless clicks, but should be a last resort for most businesses. |
Navigating these technical setups and strategic decisions can be complex. It's not just about pushing buttons in Ads Manager; it's about building a robust system that turns ad spend into predictable revenue. Making a mistake, like the one you were about to make with click tracking, can cost thousands in wasted budget and lost opportunity.
This is where professional expertise can make a huge difference. An experienced consultant can help you avoid these common traps, build a funnel that's right for your specific business, and manage the campaigns to ensure every pound you spend is working as hard as it possibly can to grow your business.
If you'd like to chat through your specific situation in more detail, we offer a free, no-obligation initial consultation where we can review your plans and provide some tailored advice. It's a great way to get a second pair of expert eyes on your strategy before you launch.
Hope this helps!
Regards,
Team @ Lukas Holschuh
