Call attribution is how a business works out which advert, listing or channel made a particular phone call happen. The trick is simple: show a different phone number to each source, so when a call comes in on a given number you know where it came from. Do it at the level of the individual website visit and you can even tell which search brought the call. Most trades never do this, so they cannot tell which half of their marketing budget is wasted.
You spend money to make the phone ring. Google Ads, a Checkatrade membership, a signwritten van, maybe a website. The phone rings. But which of those made it ring? For most trades the honest answer is "no idea," and that is an expensive thing not to know.
The problem: a phone call carries almost no information
When the phone rings, all you get is the caller's number. Nothing tells you they found you on Google rather than saw your van, or clicked an advert rather than a free listing. So you cannot tell which spend is working, and you end up renewing everything out of fear, or cutting the wrong thing.
The fix: one number per source
The whole of call attribution is one idea done at different levels of detail:
None of this changes what the caller dials in practice; it just engineers which number they see, so the call arrives carrying its own history.
The bit almost nobody does: outcomes, not just calls
Here is where most call tracking stops: it tells you a call happened. It does not tell you if that call became a job. That is the number that actually matters. If your system knows a call turned into a booked job worth £400, it can tell you not just "Checkatrade sent 4 calls" but "Checkatrade sent 4 calls worth £1,600, and cost you £89 this month." That is the difference between tracking and knowing.
When the outcome feeds back to your advertising, your ad budget starts buying jobs instead of clicks. That is the whole point, and it is why we built attribution into the product from day one.
Why this matters more every year
A growing share of calls now come from places no tracking number can reach: someone asks an AI assistant "who is a good plumber near me," gets an answer, and rings you, with no advert and no click in between. That is why the old habit of asking "how did you hear about us" still has a place alongside the numbers. And if you pay for Google Local Services Ads, attribution is the only way to know whether those leads turn into real work.
Want to see what "which advert made the phone ring" actually looks like? Talk to Daisy. Or start with what a missed call costs.
Hear Daisy answer a call.
The AI front desk that answers every call, qualifies the job and books it while you stay on the tools. Try to catch her out.
