Paid Search
Cost Per Call Is the Only PPC Metric That Matters
Clicks, impressions, and click-through rate are diagnostics. For a local service business there is one number that decides whether the account is working.
A contractor showed us a report last year with a click-through rate of 11%, an average position near the top, and a quality score of 8. Everything was green. He also could not name a single job that had come from it.
Every number in that report was real and none of them answered the question he was actually asking, which was whether the money was coming back.
Build the chain backwards
Start from the thing you want and work back toward the thing you buy.
- Revenue — what a closed job is worth to you
- Close rate — how many quotes become jobs
- Qualified call rate — how many calls are real prospects, not wrong numbers or sales pitches
- Cost per call — what you paid to make the phone ring
Multiply upward and you get the number that decides everything: what you can afford to pay for a call. If a job is worth $4,000 in gross profit, you close one in four quotes, and two in three calls are real, then a call is worth roughly $650 to you. A cost per call of $80 is a very good account. A cost per call of $700 is a leak.
Most owners have never done this arithmetic, which means they have no threshold, which means they cannot tell a good month from a bad one except by feel.
Without a target cost per call, every PPC decision is a matter of opinion.
You have to actually track calls
This is where most accounts fall down. Form fills get tracked because Google makes it easy. Calls are the majority of leads for most local service businesses and are frequently invisible.
- Call extensions with call reporting — Google’s own, free, and counts calls placed from the ad
- A dynamic number on the website — swaps the displayed number for visitors from ads, so calls from the site are attributed too
- A minimum call duration — a call that lasts eleven seconds is a wrong number, not a lead. Set the threshold at sixty seconds and the number becomes meaningful
Without the duration threshold, cost per call flatters itself badly. Wrong numbers and robocalls count as conversions, the account optimises toward whatever produces them, and the number gets better while the business gets nothing.
What the other metrics are actually for
They are diagnostics, and they are genuinely useful once you know cost per call is wrong and need to find out why.
| Metric | What a bad value tells you |
|---|---|
| Click-through rate | The ad does not match the search. Wrong keywords, or copy that promises the wrong thing. |
| Cost per click | Competitive term, or low quality score raising your price. Check relevance before blaming the market. |
| Conversion rate | The clicks are fine and the landing page is losing them. Usually the page is generic or the phone number is buried. |
| Impression share | Budget-capped or bid too low. You are missing searches you could win. |
Read in that order, they diagnose a problem. Read as headline results, they are decoration.
Where cost per call quietly goes wrong
The cheap call that never buys
Some search terms produce calls at half the usual cost and close at nothing, because the people searching them are shopping on price or are not decision makers. If you optimise purely on cost per call, the account drifts toward exactly those terms. Track close rate by campaign if you can, even roughly, and be willing to pay more for calls from terms that convert.
Seasonality read as performance
Cost per call for most trades moves with the season. Comparing March to January and declaring victory is a comparison of weather. Compare to the same month last year.
The call that the office did not answer
This one is uncomfortable. Call reporting shows missed calls, and it is common to find that ten to twenty percent of paid calls went unanswered — at lunch, after five, during a busy afternoon. Every one of those was paid for. Fixing who answers the phone is frequently the highest-ROI change available, and it costs nothing in ad budget.
Call tracking is set up as part of every paid search engagement here, before the first ad runs, because an account without it cannot be managed — only spent.