For most businesses investing in Google Ads, there's a critical blind spot in their measurement and optimization strategy: phone calls. With businesses continuing to increase their Google Ads spend—search ad spend was up 13% and YouTube ad spend up 14% from 2023 to 2024— there's mounting pressure to prove and improve return on ad spend.
But here's the kicker. In high-stakes industries like automotive, healthcare, or home services, 30-90% of leads and conversions from Google Ads happen over the phone, not through their websites, according to Invoca internal data. If you're not tracking these calls and taking action on the data, you're missing a massive opportunity to improve your Google Ads performance.
In our recent webinar, we explored how AI can help marketers unlock the full value of phone leads. Here's a breakdown of the key strategies to help you drive more high-quality leads and increase conversion rates with AI.
Why Phone Leads Matter to Your Google Ads Success
Before diving into strategies, let's establish why phone leads are so critical. The research makes it clear—a significant slice of your leads and conversions come in over the phone. This is particularly true for high-stakes purchase industries, such as automotive, healthcare, and financial services, where consumers seek assistance from a person to make informed decisions about products and services and complete their purchases. According to Invoca internal data:
- For automotive businesses, 80% of appointments come in over the phone
- Health insurance companies see 78% of policies purchased via phone calls
- Behavioral health practices get 90% of patient inquiries through calls
- For hospitals, 77% of appointments are booked by phone
- Lending companies receive 75% of leads through phone calls
Not only are phone calls prevalent, but they're also more valuable. According to Forrester research, callers convert 30% faster than web leads, spend 28% more, and have a 28% higher retention rate.
If you have comprehensive data on your web form submissions but limited insight into your calls, you’re limiting the full potential of your performance on Google Ads.
Strategy 1: Position Marketing as a Profitable Growth Driver
The first step to improving performance is changing how you measure success. Instead of focusing solely on media metrics like impressions and clicks, or even marketing metrics like qualified leads, align your measurement with business outcomes like revenue growth.
To do this with phone calls, you need to know:
- Was the call answered? (Did the caller speak to someone at your business?)
- Is the caller a quality lead? (Sales lead, appointment lead, etc.)
- Did the call convert? (Sales order, appointment booked, etc.)
- How much revenue did this lead generate?
AI conversation analytics can provide these insights by analyzing conversations in real time. These insights can enable Google Ads to measure your true ROAS and CPA.
Success Story: University Hospitals
University Hospitals uses Invoca to shift their reporting from "This ad drove 10,000 clicks" to "This ad drove 500 appointments." This direct connection to business outcomes has enabled them to demonstrate the value of their Google Ads investment more effectively.
Strategy 2: Drive More Conversions Across Google with AI
Google's AI-powered features like Broad Match, Smart Bidding, and Performance Max work best when optimized with high-quality conversion data. The principle is simple: quality measurement drives quality results.
By using AI to analyze calls and identify which ones are high-quality leads and conversions, you can provide Google's algorithms with more comprehensive data to optimize against. This enables smart bidding to make better decisions about when, where, and how much to bid for ads that drive valuable phone leads.
Success Story: MoneySolver
Financial services company MoneySolver integrated phone lead data from Invoca into Google Ads, resulting in a 30% increase in return on ad spend. As they put it, "Google knows how to optimize for high-performing phone leads because it gets attribution data from Invoca."
But optimization shouldn't stop at driving calls—it should extend to converting them. According to Invoca internal data, 39% of callers to businesses never end up speaking to a live person and 65% of contact center agents don’t ask leads to book appointments, there's significant room for improvement in call handling.
Strategy 3: Invest in Conversions That Are the Most Valuable
Not all conversions are created equal. A phone lead that converts is more valuable than one that doesn't. A new customer call is often worth more than an existing customer call. High-value services, such as engine repairs, generate more revenue than routine services, like oil changes.
AI can analyze conversations to determine the specific type of service or product a caller is interested in and assign appropriate values to these conversions. This enables value-based bidding in Google Ads, where the system optimizes for conversions that drive the most revenue, not just the most conversions.
Success Story: AT&T
AT&T implemented dynamic call routing based on caller intent and value, enabling high-intent sales calls to bypass the IVR and connect directly to sales teams. This approach increased answered calls by 85% and doubled call conversion rates.
Strategy 4: Connect With Your Audience Across YouTube
YouTube offers powerful options for reaching potential customers throughout their journey. By leveraging call data, you can:
- Remarket high-intent phone leads that didn't convert with YouTube ads
- Suppress non-lead and converted callers from seeing ads (to avoid wasting spend)
- Use your most valuable callers to power lookalike campaigns
Additionally, you can attribute phone leads and conversions from both direct YouTube ad clicks and engaged views (when someone watches your video for at least 10 seconds), giving you a more complete picture of how your video ads drive business results.
How to Start Driving Better Leads and More Revenue with Google Ads
Ready to unlock the full potential of your phone leads from Google Ads? Here are the key steps:
- Map out your marketing-to-sales journey to identify true business outcomes
- Connect your call intent and outcome data to Google's buying platforms
- Assign values based on business impact to measure and optimize ROAS
- Build audiences from intent and outcome data to power YouTube campaigns
With these strategies, you'll be well-positioned to drive more high-quality phone leads, convert them at higher rates, and ultimately grow your business through AI-powered optimization.
Want to dive deeper into these strategies and see more case studies? Watch the full Google Ads Masterclass webinar on-demand now →
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