Ask a fireplace or patio dealer how many leads their advertising produced last month and you will usually get the number of form fills, because that is the number the website can count. In this category that number is a fraction of the answer, and how big a fraction is not something anyone can tell you without measuring it.
The ratio is not a constant
The line everybody repeats about showroom retail is that most leads are calls. It is true, and we have published the numbers behind it: across three hearth retail accounts over a full year, six or seven of every eight leads came by phone rather than by form.
What gets lost is that those are three accounts in one part of one industry. Our own lead-level reporting now covers several client accounts with call tracking running, and the split is nowhere near constant. Measured from each account's first tracked call through the middle of September, without naming anybody:
- A stone importer and fabricator in Connecticut: 68 percent of tracked leads were calls, 41 of 60.
- An outdoor living and patio retailer in Pennsylvania: 77 percent, 10 of 13.
- A hearth retailer running a new store: 56 percent, 10 of 18.
- A masonry and concrete supply yard in Michigan: 34 percent, 38 of 111.
Across all four, 99 of 202 leads arrived as phone calls. Call it half, and then notice that the range underneath the half runs from a third to three quarters.
The supply yard is the interesting one. It sells to builders and contractors as well as to homeowners, its site carries a quote request form aimed at trade buyers, and its customers are comfortable typing a material list into a box. A showroom retailer selling a considered purchase to a homeowner is in a different conversation, and that homeowner picks up the phone.
The practical point is not that calls are 87 percent, or 49 percent, or any other figure you can borrow. It is that the number is specific to your business and you cannot guess it. Every dealer we have measured has been surprised by their own answer in one direction or the other.
What call tracking actually is
Two separate things get called call tracking, and they answer different questions.
Tracking calls from an ad. When call reporting is enabled in Google Ads, Google assigns a forwarding number to the ad. The customer sees that number, dials it, and the call routes through to your real line while Google records the call duration, the start time, whether it connected, and for calls longer than 15 seconds the caller's number. You set a minimum call length, and every call that runs at least that long counts as a conversion.
Tracking calls from your website. This is dynamic number insertion. A visitor who arrived from an ad sees a forwarding number in place of your usual one, so a call placed three pages into the site is still attributed to the ad that brought them. In Google's implementation this needs the Google tag and an event snippet on the site, plus call reporting switched on at the account level.
Most dealers need both, because a fireplace buyer very rarely calls the number in the ad. They click, they look at the inserts page, they look at the gallery, they check the hours, and then they call.
Three objections come up every time
"A tracking number will wreck my local SEO." This is the one that stops most dealers, and it comes from a real concern about NAP consistency, the idea that your name, address and phone number should match everywhere Google finds them. The answer is not to avoid tracking numbers. It is to keep your real number in the additional phone number field on your Google Business Profile when a tracking number sits in the primary slot, so the number in your citations, on your website and in the directories is still visibly attached to your business.
"The forwarding number will show up on my invoices and confuse customers." Google's forwarding numbers belong to Google and can be reassigned, so they are not a number to print on a truck. They are for advertising. Your real number stays on your stationery, your signage and your website for everyone who did not arrive from an ad.
"I already know the phone rings." Knowing the phone rings is not the same as knowing which half of the budget made it ring. The entire argument for tracking is attribution, not volume.
Counting calls is not the same as counting leads
This is where dealers who do install call tracking go wrong, and it is worth more than the setup instructions.
Not every call is a lead. In the four accounts above, 17 of the 97 calls with a recorded duration ran under 30 seconds. Some of those are wrong numbers, some are hang-ups, and some are somebody asking what time you close. Eight more were repeat callers, the same person calling back, which is one lead and two calls.
If you report every ring as a lead, your cost per lead looks better than it is, and you will over-invest in whichever campaign generates the most short calls. That is why the minimum call length setting exists, and why it should be a deliberate decision rather than whatever the default was. A duration long enough to be a real conversation about a fireplace is not 15 seconds.
Two more things belong in a lead definition that a raw call count will not give you:
- First-time versus repeat. A customer who calls three times during a project is one lead. Counting them three times inflates every number downstream.
- Missed calls. The most valuable report in a call tracking system is usually the list of calls nobody answered. For a showroom that closes at five and does its busiest advertising in the evening, that list is a business problem wearing a marketing costume.
Recording calls raises a state law question
Recording is optional and it is the single fastest way to find out what your advertising is actually attracting. Ten recordings will tell you whether the people calling are asking about the products you sell or about parts for a unit you have never carried.
It is also governed by state law, and the law is not uniform. Federal law and most states allow recording with the consent of one party to the call. A minority of states require the consent of everyone on the call, which in practice means an announcement at the start. If you serve customers across a state line, the stricter rule is the safer one to build around.
The practical version: turn on the announcement, keep it short, and check the current rule for the states you actually take calls from. This is a question for your attorney rather than for your agency, and any agency that waves it off is not one to take advice from.
How to set it up without breaking anything
- Turn on call reporting in Google Ads and add call assets to your search campaigns. This is an account setting, not a campaign rebuild.
- Install the tag and the event snippet so website calls from ad traffic are attributed. Without this you are only counting the people who called from the ad itself, which is the minority.
- Set the minimum call length deliberately. Pick a duration that means a conversation happened in your category, and write down why you picked it.
- Keep your real number on the Business Profile as an additional number, so citations still line up.
- Decide what a lead is before you look at a report. Qualifying duration, first-time callers only, and what counts as a wrong number. Then hold that definition still for a quarter.
- Read the missed call report every week for the first month. This is the step that tends to pay for the rest.
What you get out of it
Two things, and the second one is bigger than the first.
The first is a cost per lead you can trust, which makes every other decision straightforward: which campaign to fund, which keyword to cut, whether a second search engine is worth testing, whether social is doing a job. That is the whole basis of lead-level reporting, and it is why we install this before making any other change to an account.
The second is that you find out what the advertising is attracting, which is not always what the click-through rate suggests. We have listened to enough recordings to know that a campaign with excellent metrics can be delivering people who want a part number, and a campaign that looks mediocre can be delivering people driving over on Saturday.
If you want to know your own ratio, it takes about an afternoon to set up and thirty days to answer. We will do it on an account we manage, and we will tell you the number whether it helps our case or not.
Sources
- Google Ads Help, About call reporting, for Google forwarding numbers, the call duration, start time and connection data reported, the caller phone number being reported for calls over 15 seconds, and forwarding numbers remaining the property of Google and subject to reassignment.
- Google Ads Help, About phone call conversion tracking, for the types of call conversion tracking, the minimum call length setting counting every call of at least that duration as a conversion, and the Google tag and event snippet required for dynamic forwarding numbers on a website.
- Lead counts are from our own lead-level reporting across four client accounts, measured from each account's first tracked call through September 15, 2026. Accounts are described by category rather than named.
Recording consent law is set by state and changes. Confirm the current rule for every state you take calls from before you switch recording on.