How to Connect CallRail to Google Analytics

Connecting CallRail to Google Analytics turns vague marketing hunches into hard data, showing you exactly which campaigns, keywords, and landing pages make your business phone ring. Getting this set up is essential for accurately measuring your return on investment and optimizing your strategy. This guide will walk you through the process step-by-step, covering both the direct integration method and a more advanced setup using Google Tag Manager.

Why Bother Connecting CallRail and Google Analytics?

In a world of clicks, forms, and digital transactions, a phone call can feel like an offline event that’s impossible to track. But phone calls are often the highest-intent leads a business can get. When you fail to connect them to their digital origin, you're missing a huge piece of your marketing performance puzzle. Integrating these two platforms solves this problem and unlocks several key benefits.

Get a Complete Picture of Your Marketing ROI

Imagine you’re running a Google Ads campaign. A user clicks your ad, visits your landing page, and instead of filling out a form, they pick up the phone and call the number on the site. Without call tracking integrated into your analytics, your GA4 report will show a session that just bounced or ended without a conversion. That expensive ad click looks like a failure, when in reality, it generated your best lead of the week. Connecting CallRail attributes that call back to the original source, ad, and keyword, providing a complete and accurate view of your campaign ROI.

Identify Your Most Effective Channels and Campaigns

Once call data is flowing into Google Analytics as an event, you can slice and dice it just like any other conversion. You can finally answer crucial questions with confidence:

• Does our organic SEO content generate more calls than our paid search campaigns?
• Which Facebook ad creative is driving the most inquiries?
• Is the blog post we published last quarter still generating valuable phone leads?

This data lets you see beyond surface-level metrics like clicks and sessions to understand what truly drives customer action.

Optimize Your Strategy for High-Value Leads

When you know what works, you can do more of it. With call conversion data in Google Analytics, you can reallocate your budget to the channels and campaigns delivering the best results. You can refine your ad messaging to speak directly to the kind of user who is likely to call. For instance, if you discover a specific landing page drives a high volume of quality calls, you can focus on driving more traffic there, knowing it’s a proven winner for generating real business.

Before You Start: What You'll Need

To ensure a smooth setup process, take a moment to gather the following. Getting these things in order now will save you from hitting a roadblock midway through.

• Active CallRail Account: You need an active plan with Administrator or Manager-level permissions to access the integration settings.
• Active Google Analytics 4 Property: This guide focuses on Google Analytics 4, which is the current standard. Make sure you have the Property ID (e.g., "G-XXXXXXXXXX") handy.
• Administrator Access to Google Analytics: You'll need Admin permissions for the GA4 property you want to connect to in order to authorize the connection and configure conversion events.
• Website Access: You’ll need the ability to add a piece of JavaScript code to your website, either by editing the website's HTML directly, through your content management system (like WordPress), or via Google Tag Manager.

Method 1: Using the Native CallRail Integration (The Easiest Way)

For most users, CallRail’s direct integration is the fastest and most straightforward way to connect to Google Analytics. It handles sending the data automatically without complex configuration. Here’s how to do it.

Step 1: Install the CallRail JavaScript Snippet on Your Website

This snippet is the engine behind CallRail’s magic. It scans your website for the phone numbers you’ve designated and dynamically swaps them with unique tracking numbers based on the visitor's traffic source. This is how CallRail knows whether a caller came from Google Organic search, a paid CPC click, or a social media post.

1. Log in to your CallRail account.
2. Navigate to Settings at the top.
3. Find the company whose site you’re working on and select Integrations from the list.
4. Look for the JavaScript Snippet integration and click it to grab your unique code.

The code will look something like this:

<pre><code>&lt,script src="//cdn.callrail.com/companies/ACCOUNT_ID/sites/SITE_ID/s/main.js"&gt,&lt,/script&gt,</code></pre>

Copy this entire line of code. You need to install it on every page of your website where you want to track calls. The best practice is to place it in the global header or footer of your site, just before the closing <\/body> tag. If you use WordPress, you can use a plugin like "Insert Headers and Footers" to easily add the script across your entire site.

Step 2: Activate the Google Analytics Integration in CallRail

With the script installed, it's time to tell CallRail to start sending data to GA4.

1. In your CallRail account, go back to Settings > Integrations.
2. Find Google Analytics in the list of available integrations and click "Activate."
3. A Google authorization window will pop up. Sign in to the Google account that has administrator access to the GA4 property you want to use.
4. Grant CallRail permission to access your Google Analytics data. CallRail needs this to send event data.
5. From the dropdown menu, select the specific Google Analytics account and the GA4 property you want to link.
6. Once selected, click “Authorize” or “Complete Integration.”

That’s it! The two platforms are now connected.

Step 3: Configure Your Reporting Options

After activating, you can fine-tune what data gets sent. You can choose to send call data as an event for all phone calls, or you can get more specific:

• Send events for all calls: Recommended for most users. This sends a "phone_call" event to GA4 for every call.
• Send events for "First-Time Callers" only: This sends a "first_time_call" event. This is useful if you want to focus exclusively on new customer acquisition.
• Define a Call Value: You can assign a static monetary value to each call. For example, if you know each qualified phone lead is worth, on average, $50 to your business, entering "50" here will send that value along with the conversion data, helping you calculate ROI in reports.

We recommend starting with the default of sending an event for all calls. This provides the most complete dataset to start with.

Step 4: Verify the Connection

After setting everything up, you need to verify that data is flowing correctly. Please note it can take a few hours for the first events to appear in Google Analytics.

1. Make a Test Call: Open your website in an incognito browser window or while connected to a different network to simulate a new visitor. You should see the phone number on your site swap to a CallRail tracking number. Make a brief call to that number.
2. Check GA4 Realtime Reports: Log into your Google Analytics 4 property. In the left-hand navigation, go to Reports > Realtime. In the "Event count by Event name" card, you should see your CallRail event ("phone_call" or "first_time_call") appear within minutes of your call.
3. Check GA4 Event Reports: After about 24 hours, navigate to Reports > Engagement > Events. You should see your call event listed in the table. This confirms GA4 is properly receiving and processing the data.

Method 2: Integrating via Google Tag Manager (Advanced Control)

If your website already relies heavily on Google Tag Manager (GTM) to manage marketing tags, you might prefer this method. It provides more granular control over when and how your GA4 event tag fires.

Step 1: Push Call Events to the Data Layer in CallRail

First, you need to tell CallRail to send its data to GTM's data layer instead of directly to Google Analytics. The data layer is a temporary information hub that GTM uses to pass data between your site and your tags.

1. In your CallRail account, go to the Google Analytics integration settings screen.
2. Instead of authenticating with GA4, look for an option that says "Push to dataLayer..." or similar.
3. Enable this setting. You will typically be asked to name the event. A standard name like "callrail_event" works well.

Now, every time your CallRail JavaScript snippet tracks a call, it will push this custom "callrail_event" into the data layer for GTM to see.

Step 2: Create a Custom Event Trigger in GTM

Next, you’ll set up a "listener" in GTM that waits for the "callrail_event" to happen.

1. Log into your Google Tag Manager account and select your container.
2. In the left menu, click Triggers > New.
3. Give your trigger a name, like "CE - CallRail Event".
4. Click Trigger Configuration and choose the Custom Event trigger type.
5. In the Event Name field, enter the exact name you specified in CallRail in the previous step (e.g., "callrail_event").
6. Leave it set to "All Custom Events" and save your trigger.

Step 3: Create the GA4 Event Tag in GTM

Finally, create the tag that will take the information recognized from the trigger and formally send it to Google Analytics 4.

1. In GTM, go to Tags > New.
2. Name your tag something descriptive, like "GA4 Event - Phone Call".
3. Click Tag Configuration and choose Google Analytics: GA4 Event.
4. In the Measurement ID field, select your existing GA4 configuration tag or manually enter your G-XXXXXXXXXX ID.
5. For the Event Name, type "phone_call" to keep naming consistent and professional.
6. Under Triggering, select the custom event trigger you just created ("CE - CallRail Event").
7. Save your tag.

To finalize, use GTM's Preview mode to test the setup. Visit your site, make a test call, and watch the GTM debugger. You should see "callrail_event" fire, which should then cause your "GA4 Event - Phone Call" tag to fire. If all looks good, click Submit to publish your changes.

What Now? Putting Your CallRail Data to Use in GA4

Having the data in Google Analytics is great, but its real value comes from using it to make better marketing decisions.

Mark Your Call Events as Conversions

This is the most important next step. By default, GA4 sees your "phone_call" event just like any other event, such as a scroll or a click. You need to tell it that this specific event is a valuable conversion for your business.

1. In GA4, click the Admin gear icon in the bottom-left.
2. Under the Property column, go to Events.
3. Find your "phone_call" event in the list (you may need to wait 24 hours for it to appear).
4. On the right, toggle the switch under the Mark as conversion column.

Now, the "phone_call" event will be included in all of your conversion reports, allowing you to attribute calls directly to different marketing activities.

Analyze Call Performance in Your Reports

Once your call event is designated as a conversion, you can easily analyze it across standard GA4 reports:

• Traffic Acquisition: Go to Reports > Acquisition > Traffic Acquisition. Here, you can change the primary dimension to "Session source / medium," "Session campaign," or "Session default channel group" to see which sources are driving the most call conversions.
• Landing Pages: Go to Reports > Engagement > Pages and screens. This is invaluable for identifying which pages are most effective at persuading visitors to pick up the phone.

Always remember to add the "Conversions" column to your reports and filter for your specific 'phone_call' conversion to focus your analysis.

Final Thoughts

Connecting CallRail to Google Analytics closes one of the biggest blind spots in marketing attribution. It gives you the power to see which online efforts are generating valuable offline conversations, allowing for smarter budget allocation and a truly data-driven strategy. Whether you choose the simple direct integration or the more flexible Google Tag Manager method, you're taking a critical step toward understanding the complete impact of your marketing.

Gathering data across platforms is the first step, but analyzing it is where the real work begins. To make that analysis easier, we use Graphed to link data sources like Google Analytics with one click. It lets us create dashboards and get insights using plain English. For example, we can ask, "Show me my top landing pages by sessions and their corresponding phone call conversions last month," and get a live, shareable dashboard in seconds. This allows us to skip the manual report-building and focus on making decisions and acting on insights.