Surfside PPC Podcast

Corey: 00:00

What's up everyone? Welcome to the Surfside PPC Podcast. This is my very first episode of the Surfside PPC Podcast. The whole goal is for this to be a q and a podcast where you can ask me questions, I can give you answers, and we we can all learn a little more about Google Ads, pay per click advertising, and everything marketing. So my main area of expertise is Google Ads, but if you wanna ask questions about meta ads, SEO, anything related to marketing, driving leads, things things that will improve our campaigns and drive us a few more leads in 2026 and beyond, feel free to ask those questions.

Corey: 00:36

This podcast is brought to you by Surfside PPC. So if you go to surfsideppc.com, you can find everything we have there. We have management, we have consulting. You can join my premium section. So if you join my premium section, you will get access to my premium content.

Corey: 00:49

You can ask me questions there and those answers will be answered on the podcast. So that is the whole point of the premium section will be for some community, premium content, asking some questions. So go to surfsidepc.com. You can find all the information you need there. Let's get started with the actual podcast content itself.

Corey: 01:07

So every single podcast, I'm gonna be answering two questions, related questions, questions that are about similar topics and things that I get frequently or things that people have asked me. So for the first one, it's gonna be the questions I pretty much get the most, and that is going to be conversion tracking. So just going over the importance of conversion tracking, but basically one of the main conversions I get is, as a lead generation company, what should we track? What should we be tracking as a conversion? And ultimately, there's not there's not really too many things you can track besides your actual calls, forms, contacts.

Corey: 01:45

Anytime somebody submits information to you looking for you to do a job for them, that is ultimately the very first thing that you wanna track. Now, what I generally recommend to people is if you do have a CRM, and you do have a way to qualify leads, so you know, somebody clicks on an ad, somebody calls your business, and 10 later, that person actually books a job with you and you're able to, you know, get a job, they go into your CRM. A lot of CRMs integrate with Google Ads now to where they'll be able to take that person's initial Google click ID and actually assign it to that offline conversion. So this is also called offline conversion tracking, conversion imports, but essentially something that is happening either at a store or it is something that is going to be happening in your CRM where you then have that data uploaded back into Google Ads, and it looks at all the clicks your Google Ads sent. So to basically answer this question, what are you generally tracking as a lead generation company?

Corey: 02:44

I would say that the main things that you want to be tracking, I would say if you have no physical location, you're just getting people calling, filling out forms, that's what you wanna track. It's going to be calls directly from your ads, calls from your website using call forwarding. So people who are on a desktop, laptop, pull out their phone to call using call forwarding. And then the other thing is gonna be people who click on call buttons on your website and actually use that to place a call. Now the click on call button, you have to always keep in mind that one only requires a click on a button.

Corey: 03:15

So does a conversion action that could potentially be not always accurate, whereas the, what I call them desktop phone calls, but basically call forwarding, from a website, those are going to be require a thirty second, sixty second, however you wanna have that set phone call to become as a conversion, same with calls from your ads. So ultimately what you're looking for are, you know, I'm a big just use the sixty seconds, sixty second or longer phone calls as a conversion. Desktop phone calls, that's gonna use call forwarding. Calls from ads, that is going to be calls directly from your call assets. Now, as I talk about these things, if you're like, this sounds like another language.

Corey: 03:53

That's if you're running Google Ads, if you're managing Google Ads, I do provide consulting, so always reach out. But the other one is gonna be the mobile clicks to call. Now, those are the three main conversions that I generally always start with, with new lead generation accounts. Mechanic reaches out, tree service reaches out, plumber reaches out, electrician reaches out. Any of these types of companies, now mechanics have a physical location, but you're always wanna track that phone call because that's the first step a lot of people take before business happens.

Corey: 04:22

So you're tracking that phone call from Google Ads. Next is going to be form completions, booked appointments, other things on the website where people submit information to you. I have some clients who have multiples of these where one might be a request a free quote, another one might be request a callback. So you could do different options of these, but ultimately anytime somebody submits an inquiry to you, that counts as a conversion. When I get new Google Ads clients, it 99% of the time, well, unless it's a referral, but if I'm getting it, it's going to be somebody fills out my contact form, I contact them back.

Corey: 04:59

The conversion is the contact form. So that's what you wanna track back into Google Ads. So the other thing is going to be if you have something set up in the case of a live chat, in case of text messaging options, any of these, then you wanna set all those up as conversions as well. I have had people that their main call to action is a click to email button, which I generally don't recommend, but a click to email button and it wasn't tracked, and it's like, hey, why don't we just do a form and you'll get the email anyway, we can track the form. And a simple change like that on Google Ads, only gave us more conversion data because we were able to track it, but the conversion rate went way up and they got more leads.

Corey: 05:42

So it's like, sometimes what you wanna do is just do what works, focus on the easiest way for clients to contact you, and make sure that is tracked back. How do we do this? I track all my conversions using Google Tag Manager. So you install Google Tag Manager. Google Tag Manager is free.

Corey: 05:59

You install Google Tag Manager on your website. From Google Tag Manager, you can set up every single piece that you need to for this to work. The conversion linker tag, the conversion tracking tags that you need to use. Google Tag Manager, the whole point of it is to create actions for things that are happening on your website and using tags and deploying pixels. Basically, to be able to track events that are happening much better on websites, mobile apps, anything.

Corey: 06:27

So Google Tag Manager is my number one way to track conversions. You can also use Google Analytics four and import your conversions directly from Google Analytics four. You can also just hard code conversions from Google Ads. So when you're setting up Google Ads from the Google Ads interface, that is how you would wanna do it. Now I do have videos on my channel, on the YouTube channel for how to set up conversion tracking, tag manager, all of these different things, and there's a lot of resources out there for how to do this.

Corey: 06:54

But set up conversion tracking with tag manager anytime there is a key action that's happening for your business. That's kind of the main takeaway here. So question is basically, you know, what conversions do we set up for lead generation? And it's going to be at least those three main phone calls, calls from ads, mobile clicks to call, desktop, call forwarding, and then the lead form, contact form. So there's always like four main conversions that you're tracking.

Corey: 07:21

Any other way people can get in contact with you, you want to track that as a conversion. Now there's other conversions that may track when you link your Google business profile. Sometimes you can track calls directly from your business profile. So there's different things that you can track from there. Get directions, store visits, so different things that you can kind of track.

Corey: 07:39

But from a lead generation perspective, that's generally what I am starting with. And I always, the very first thing I do is conversion tracking because it's the most important thing in Google Ads. Your bidding, your performance, everything is going to be based on the conversions you're actually sending back to Google. So that will finish question number one. Question number two is going to be, should I use CallRail or another third party tool to track phone calls, forms, text messages, you know, all of these different actions that people are gonna all these different ways that people contact us.

Corey: 08:13

So my answer to this question is, if you value being able to look at a report at the end of the month and understand where everything for your business is coming from, then CallRail is a good investment. CallRail is probably going to cost the average, you know, a company that is doing, let's just say, let's say you're a company that processes a 100 leads a month, 100 leads a month. So through CallRail, you're gonna have those 100 leads will come through, and basically each individual lead is gonna be tied back to phone number, you know, where they called from. They'll have more data about the actual caller themselves, the people that are contacting you. So it does give you a better picture in terms of attribution, what ads are actually working, what which one of your efforts are driving the best results.

Corey: 09:00

So if you're running meta ads and Google ads, and let's say you're doing you know, you're investing in SEO and you have traffic coming in from your business profile, you're able to see all of these things. Here's where this phone call came from. Here was the call duration. Here is a call transcript. So the transcript is the other thing that's valuable for companies that really want to make sure that they don't have drop offs because of the salesperson or because of the sales process.

Corey: 09:26

That's where a transcript can actually be very useful. There are also a lot of AI tools that CallRail provides along with others. So WhatConverts is another one that does similar things that CallRail will do. Now, the one thing I'll always say is you really need a lot of conversion data in Google Ads. So one of the biggest challenges I have at times is you have a client that reaches out that isn't doing bulk leads.

Corey: 09:48

So there's certain industries, a floor installer is generally, like a floor installer that's targeting a single city is generally not gonna be doing 10 floors a day. They're not gonna be doing two, three, four jobs a day. It's kind of one of those things where you get a job, the job is gonna take several days, maybe a week or two, depending on how intensive that job is. There's some that you may have a commercial building. So ultimately, you are trying to get these these jobs to keep you kind of always busy and and keep you booked out.

Corey: 10:19

So sometimes what you I mean, you really wanna track that phone call. You wanna track that lead form, but that's really where I start tracking. Okay. This person, you know, things that might not necessarily include all of that. So sometimes it might be a key visit to a page that somebody is on your website for over ninety seconds, and they also visit the, you know, this specific page on your website.

Corey: 10:42

So you kinda say, okay, this person interacted with our website for a little bit. You know, we're gonna start valuing this as, and this is what I call a pre conversion. Now pre conversions are never gonna go into CallRail. But pre conversions are things like engaged sessions, For one client, we have a button on the actual page itself. When people get on the call to action, book your free consultation.

Corey: 11:39

So that goes to the contact page. So we just track that button as a pre conversion. The goal is to get enough pre conversion data in so you can just really optimize for your conversion data. So I generally don't tell people, hey, you need to optimize for pre conversion data. But when you're really struggling to get volume, when you're not doing five to 10 phone calls a day, and like for higher end services, if you sell retaining walls and you do driveways and you do big concrete work, a lot of times you're processing tons and tons of phone calls and lead forms every single day.

Corey: 12:10

There's just not that level of business out there all the time that there's 10 people inquiring on a given day. So basically for some of these what you want is to make sure that you're just telling Google, hey, that person came to my website, they visited it for x amount, they engaged with the website, they visited a key page, they clicked on a key button. You know, some of those things can still be worthwhile, and I tend to do things like that more, and look at the rates of those things than actually using like a heat mapping tool or anything like that. So answer the question for CallRail, the answer to me is generally you don't have to use it. It's valuable if you do actually want more of that data of like, where is everything coming from?

Corey: 12:48

You can actually track text messaging through it. You can track forms. You can track calls. So you can track everything through it. Gives you kind of a cleaner picture than what Google Ads does.

Corey: 12:57

But through Google Ads, you could still get a call details report that gives you the phone calls that are calling you, when they came in, when conversions came in, which conversions came in. You just kinda don't always get the picture of tying that individual conversion to a specific click. The final thing with CallRail, and this is really where, you know, companies that are doing this are getting a step ahead is with CallRail, you could put a value behind each individual client. So let's just say you have 20 different phone calls in a given week and you go back on, okay, so these seven different phone calls turned into jobs for us. This job turned into, you know, make up whatever, dollars 700.

Corey: 13:36

This job was $1,500 This job was $300 You could actually put those numbers in and fire that data back into Google Ads. And that's gonna give you more data and more value data for Google Ads. So they could actually say, hey, you drove this many leads, but it actually led to x amount of conversion value of revenue for your business. So now we can actually bid to drive you more revenue. So definitely something that you wanna implement.

Corey: 14:01

The more you can do that, the better. But ultimately, what we're trying to do is track the key performance indicators, make sure that we're getting all of that data into our Google Ads account, tying it back to our campaign targeting, and bidding effectively so that we could drive the best possible results. So that is going to conclude episode one of the Surfside PPC Podcast. If you wanna get in touch with me, surfside p p c dot com, contact form, consulting, management, premium. There's a tools page on there for the tools that I use.

Corey: 14:30

So go there, get everything you need. Thank you for listening today. Please subscribe, tell a friend. I'll be back with more episodes. If you wanna ask a question, so my plan is to make this more personalized for people that are in the community.

Corey: 14:42

If you wanna ask a question, then basically all you're gonna have to do is join the premium section, and I'm gonna go through questions that people ask in there. We're gonna do a post and just make sure that post goes out. People ask the questions and I will answer that. So thanks for listening, and I'll see you in a future episode.