Call Tracking Glossary – Call Tracked

AI search traffic: Visits from AI assistants and answer engines such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot and Claude, when someone clicks a link in an answer to reach your website.
Attribution: Working out which marketing channel, campaign or keyword deserves the credit for a lead or sale. Call tracking adds phone calls to attribution, which most analytics tools miss.
Attribution model: The rule for sharing credit when a customer touched several channels. First touch gives it all to the first channel, last touch to the last one, linear splits it evenly, and time decay and position-based models weight it towards certain touches.
Call extension: A phone number shown alongside a Google Ads advert. Google can track calls from the extension itself, but not calls from people who clicked through to your website first. Call tracking covers those.
Call flow: The set of rules that decide what happens when a number is called: which phones ring, in what order, what the caller hears and what happens out of hours.
Call recording announcement: The message telling callers that the call may be recorded. In the UK, you need to tell people before you record them, and the announcement is the simplest way to do it.
Call whisper: A short message only you hear when you answer, such as "Google Ads call", so you know where the caller came from before you say hello.
Closed-loop reporting: Feeding sales results back to the marketing that caused them, so reports show revenue by channel, not just leads.
Conversion: An action you count as a success, such as a phone call over 60 seconds, a booked appointment or a sale.
Cost per lead: What you spend on a channel divided by the number of real leads it brings in. Call tracking makes this possible for phone leads.
Customer journey: The pages, visits and channels a person touched before they called or filled in a form.
DNI (dynamic number insertion): A script on your website that shows each visitor a phone number tied to how they arrived. When they call it, the call is matched to their visit.
First-party cookie: A small file set by your own website. Our tracking script uses one to remember which number a visitor was shown, so the right source is recorded if they come back later.
Freephone number: An 0800 or 0808 number. Free to call from UK landlines and mobiles.
GCLID: The Google Click Identifier. A code Google Ads adds to your web address when someone clicks an ad. We store it with the call, which lets us send the call back to Google Ads as a conversion against the right click.
Geographic number: A number starting 01 or 02 tied to a place, such as 0113 for Leeds. Callers tend to trust local numbers more.
IVR: Interactive voice response. The "press 1 for sales, 2 for service" menu callers hear on some lines.
Keyword-level tracking: Tracking that tells you which search keyword led to a call, not just which campaign. It uses a pool of numbers so each visitor can be shown a unique one.
Lead score: A number from 0 to 100 our AI gives each call, based on what was said, to show how likely the caller is to become a customer.
Lookback window: How far back visits count towards a lead. With a 90-day window, a visit from four months ago is not credited.
Missed-call text-back: An automatic text sent to anyone whose call you do not answer, so they wait for you rather than ringing a competitor.
Non-geographic number: A number not tied to a place, such as 03, 0800 or 0808. 03 numbers cost the same as calling an 01 or 02 number.
Number pool: A set of numbers used for dynamic number insertion. Each website visitor is given one from the pool for the length of their visit.
Number porting: Moving an existing phone number from one provider to another so you can keep using it.
Offline conversion: A sale or booking that happens away from the website, such as over the phone or in person, sent back to the ad platform.
Offline conversion import: Sending conversions that happened away from your website, such as phone calls, back into Google Ads, Microsoft Ads or Meta so their bidding can learn from them.
PCI DSS: The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard. If card details are taken over the phone, they must not be stored in recordings. Pausing recording and redacting transcripts handles this.
PECR: The Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations. UK rules covering cookies, marketing calls and texts. They sit alongside UK GDPR.
Position-based attribution: An attribution model where the first and last touch get most of the credit and the touches in between share the rest.
Session: A single visit to your website. DNI ties a phone number to a session so the call can be matched to it.
Static tracking number: A number that always points to one channel, such as the number on your van or Google Business Profile.
Time decay attribution: An attribution model that shares credit across every touch, with recent ones counting most.
Tracking number: Any phone number used to identify where a call came from. It forwards to your real phone, so nothing changes for the person answering.
Transcription: Turning a call recording into text, split by who was speaking.
UK GDPR: The UK version of the General Data Protection Regulation. It governs how personal data, including call recordings, is collected, stored and used.
UTM parameters: Tags added to a link, such as utm_source=newsletter, that tell analytics tools where a visitor came from. Our tracking script reads them to choose a number.
Webhook: A message our system sends to another system the moment something happens, such as a call ending. Developers use webhooks to connect calls to their own tools.
Whisper: See call whisper.