If most of your orders come by phone, this story has an unpleasant twist. People call after seeing your ad, you hear them, and the Google Ads account shows zero or very little. But ads learn from what the account sees. So they learn blind. Below: why this happens, what you can check yourself in ten minutes, and when you need call tracking (a dedicated line for ads that logs every conversation).
About accuracy. The facts about the forwarding number were checked against the Google Ads help on 5 November 2026 (help page on the forwarding number). Menu names depend on the version of the interface.
1. Why Google does not count your calls
Google has its own tool for this: a forwarding number. It is a unique number that Google puts into the ad. A person dials it, the call is forwarded to your real number, and the system records the time, duration, campaign and ad group.
One condition decides everything: according to Google’s help, such numbers are available in 30 countries. They include Poland, Germany, the Czech Republic, the United Kingdom and the USA. Ukraine is not on the list. So here the account cannot count them on its own.
What it sees instead. The most you can set up is a tap on the number: a person tapped the call button in the ad or the number on the site. That is an event in the account, but it is not yet a conversation.
2. A click on the number: why it is not a call
All it knows is that the person tapped. What comes next is what it does not know:
- whether they actually called, or changed their mind on the dial screen;
- whether they got through, or hit a busy signal;
- whether it was a customer, or a competitor, a supplier or a wrong number.
There is a second problem: a person may tap the number twice, and it records two actions instead of one call.
Our position: such a conversion is an unreliable basis for teaching ads. It shows interest, not a result. We wrote more about telling primary actions from supporting ones in the article on what your ads count as a lead.
An honest nuance: practitioners disagree here. Some keep the mobile click on the number as a primary action: otherwise the ads see no conversations at all, and this way there is at least some signal. Others advise removing it from the primary ones so that the ads do not learn from a stand-in for the real action. Google gives no official figure for what share of clicks turns into conversations. If the click stays primary, compare it with real calls once a month.
Where the money goes
Invisible calls break not the report but the decisions. Picture a setup where only submitted forms count as a lead. A campaign that brings people who call looks weak in the report: it has few leads. You cut it, and next month you wonder why there are fewer calls. And the reverse: a campaign that collects forms looks great, even though it brings fewer real orders.
The second loss is quieter. Google’s automated bidding looks for people similar to those who completed the goal. If your goal is only a form, the ads will look for people who fill in forms, not people who call. For a business where people order by phone, that is a different audience.
3. What to check yourself in ten minutes
You do not need to know how to set up ads.
- Ask your manager or administrator how many calls there were last week. Better still, separately: how many were from new customers. If you keep a log in your phone or CRM, use it.
- Open Google Ads and go to “Goals” → “Conversions” → “Summary”. Find the phone-related actions and see how many there are for the same week.
- Compare the two numbers.
How to read the result. A small difference is normal: someone was away, someone called from a number not tied to the ad. If the account shows zero and the manager counts ten, that is exactly the problem of this article. If it shows far more than the manager, most likely clicks or double taps are being counted. For such gaps, including when there are leads but no sales, see the article on leads without sales.
4. What call tracking is and what it changes
Call tracking gives people coming from ads a separate phone number and records which ad, site or campaign they called from, how long the conversation lasted, and whether it was answered. The number is swapped in on the site automatically, and ordinary visitors keep seeing your own.
Services that do this: Binotel and Ringostat. Check with the service itself what your plan includes: it determines whether you get call recording, tracking down to the keyword, and data passed to Google Ads.
What it gives the owner:
- you see the real count of phone conversations from ads, not taps;
- you can tell missed from answered. Those missed are a pain of their own, by the way: for calls after closing time see the article on 6 pm;
- you can open the log and understand whether the ads bring the people you are looking for.
When you do not need call tracking. If only a small share of orders comes by phone and the bulk is forms and cart, a separate service may cost more than it brings. Then a weekly check against your log is enough. There is no official threshold at which call tracking pays off. Services quote their own benchmarks by phone share and budget, but those are their sales figures, so we do not repeat them.
5. Do not pass every call to the ads
There is a trap when calls are passed to Google Ads. Pass everything and missed ones, wrong numbers and existing customers all end up in the learning. Practitioners advise passing only target calls: long enough, from new people, on the right topic. If your service can mark a call as a target, set up passing only for those.
In practitioners’ chats there is a described case where quality collapsed after a switch from clicks on the number to passing everything. The cause there is not isolated: budgets were changed at the same time. So it is not proof, just a reason for caution. Change one campaign, not the whole setup, so you can roll back.
6. What we do in practice
From our practice, the order is this.
- We compare the manager’s calls with the account data. If the gap is large and orders come by phone, we suggest call tracking.
- We keep the click on the number as a supporting action (for observation), and take forms and target calls from the tracking service as the basis.
- Once a month we compare: how many target calls in the log, how many in Google Ads.
- Then, if there is a CRM, we pass real sales to the ads: see the article on offline conversions.
This is our practice, not a promise of results: every business has its own calls and its own nuances.
Summary
In Ukraine Google has no forwarding number, so it does not count them on its own: it sees only a tap on the number. If most of your orders come by phone, the ads learn blind. Compare a week’s calls from your manager with the report. If they do not match, you need call tracking, and only target calls are worth passing to the ads.
Want a free audit of your Google Ads account? Send us a request: we will check whether the account sees those phone leads, where the money goes and whether the numbers in your report are true.