I've used WhatConverts across my PPC clients for years. Here's what it does, how I wire it into Google Ads, and four examples of what happens when you do.
Some links in this post are affiliate links. If you sign up through them I earn a commission at no extra cost to you. I was using WhatConverts long before I had an affiliate link, and I'd recommend it either way.
If you run Google Ads for a lead generation business, there's a good chance your account is optimising for the wrong thing.
It's one of the most common problems I see when I take over an account. On paper everything looks fine. Cost per lead is reasonable, the conversion column is healthy, the campaigns are producing enquiries. Then you ask the client how many of those enquiries turned into customers, and the room goes quiet.
The gap between "form submitted" and "actually worth having" is where most lead gen accounts quietly lose money. WhatConverts is the tool I use to close it.
If you want to try it as you read, WhatConverts offers a 14-day free trial (affiliate link), and they'll extend it to 30 days once you've had the onboarding call. More on that below.
What is WhatConverts?
WhatConverts is a lead tracking platform. It records every phone call, form submission and chat on your website, and for each one it captures where the lead came from: the channel, the campaign, the keyword, the landing page, and the search term if it came from Google Ads.
Forms are captured with the full submission, not just a "someone filled in a form" ping. Chats and even e-commerce transactions can be tracked the same way. Calls aren't the most important part of this, but they're the part that gets missed. Tracing a sale back to a click and a lead is hard without a third-party tool, and calls are usually where it falls over. Plenty of accounts I take on track forms properly and ignore the phone altogether, even when the phone is where most of the customers come from. So it's worth a section of its own.
How the call tracking works, and why it's the best I've used
Call tracking works by dynamic number insertion. You keep your real phone number, and WhatConverts swaps it on the page for a tracking number based on how each visitor arrived. Someone who clicked a Google Ads ad sees one number, someone from organic search sees another, and someone who typed in your web address sees your normal number. When the tracking number is called it forwards straight to your real one, and WhatConverts logs the call with the campaign, keyword and search term behind it.
From the caller's side nothing changes. They see a phone number, they ring it, your phone rings. From your side, every call now comes with a record of what caused it.
A few things WhatConverts does with calls that I lean on constantly:
- Call recording and transcription. Every call is recorded (with the usual announcement) and can be transcribed. When a client tells me the leads are poor, I can listen to the last twenty calls and find out whether the problem is the keyword, the ad, or the person answering the phone. That one feature has settled more arguments than any report I've ever built.
- Keyword-level call data. Because the number swap happens per visitor, a call can be tied to the exact search term that produced it. That's what lets you add negatives based on calls, not just forms.
- UK mobile tracking numbers. This is the one that surprised me. Most call tracking providers I've looked at can only offer UK landline or 0800 numbers, which is a problem if you're a plumber, a drainage company or a wheel repairer whose customers expect to see an 07 number and are more likely to ring one. WhatConverts can provide UK mobile tracking numbers, and I've had trouble finding anyone else who does it as cleanly.
- Call flows. On the higher plans you can route calls, add a whisper so the person answering hears "Google Ads call" before they pick up, and send missed calls somewhere useful.
- Missed call visibility. Missed and short calls are logged too. On more than one account that's shown a client they were losing a chunk of their ad spend to an unanswered phone at lunchtime.
How WhatConverts compares on price
This is what the main call tracking options cost for a single UK business, taken from each provider's own pricing page in October 2026. Entry plans are listed because that's what most small businesses start on. Prices move, so treat this as a guide and check before you buy.
WhatConverts
- Entry price: from $30/mo (about £23). The Plus plan with forms and the Google Ads integration is $60/mo (about £45). Extra UK numbers $2.50/mo.
- Qualified leads and sales value to Google Ads: yes, on Plus and above
- UK mobile (07) numbers: yes, $3.50/mo per number
- Contract: monthly or annual, cancel any time. 14-day free trial, extended to 30 days after the onboarding call
CallRail
- Entry price: from $50/mo (about £38) in the US, or $95/mo with form tracking. UK plans are priced separately in US dollars and start higher, at $60/mo or $110/mo with form tracking. UK plans include 5 numbers and 500 minutes.
- Qualified leads and sales value to Google Ads: call values can be sent, but only once per call, so they can't be updated later. Automatic AI conversion tagging is on the $150/mo Lead Conversion plan
- UK mobile (07) numbers: no. CallRail offers UK geographic (01/02), 03 and 0800 numbers, but not mobiles
- Contract: monthly, 14-day free trial. Annual billing is only available in the US
CTM (CallTrackingMetrics)
- Entry price: from $79/mo (about £60), with no numbers or minutes included. Numbers and minutes are paid for on top: UK local numbers are $1.58/mo plus $0.046 a minute, and 0800 numbers $3.25/mo plus $0.126 a minute.
- Qualified leads and sales value to Google Ads: manual scoring with values on Lite, automated on the $179/mo Pro plan
- UK mobile (07) numbers: not stated. CTM offers UK geographic (01) and 0800 numbers
- Contract: monthly with no contract, or discounted annual and 2-year prepay. No free trial, but the first month's plan fee is waived
Mediahawk (UK)
- Entry price: from £199/mo, or £179/mo billed annually, for 1 dynamic number pool or 10 static numbers. Calls are charged on top: a fee per call (12p to 15p depending on plan) plus per-minute rates.
- Qualified leads and sales value to Google Ads: yes. You can send only meaningful calls, with values. Matching calls to sales data is on the £299/mo Professional plan
- UK mobile (07) numbers: no. Mediahawk only provides landline numbers, though calls can be forwarded to a mobile
- Contract: monthly or annual (10% off), with a 30-day notice period. Demo rather than a free trial
Infinity (UK)
- Entry price: from £249/mo plus 25p per call. The £349 Pro plan drops that to 20p a call and adds the full set of integrations.
- Qualified leads and sales value to Google Ads: yes. Calls can be filtered by goal and sent with values, and the Google Ads integration is on the entry plan
- UK mobile (07) numbers: not stated
- Contract: monthly fees, with a minimum term set in your order form (not published). Demo rather than a free trial
Ruler Analytics (UK)
- Entry price: from £299/mo, or £269/mo billed annually, for up to 10,000 website visits a month. Ruler calls its prices indicative. A full attribution platform rather than call tracking alone.
- Qualified leads and sales value to Google Ads: yes, revenue attribution via CRM
- UK mobile (07) numbers: no. Ruler says it can't provide mobile numbers
- Contract: monthly or annual (10% off), no contract, cancel any time
A couple of things stand out. WhatConverts is the cheapest way to get forms, calls and a proper Google Ads integration in one place, by some distance. CallRail is the nearest like-for-like and is good, but its UK plans cost more than its US ones, its automatic conversion tagging sits on the $150 plan, and it doesn't offer UK mobile numbers. Headline prices also aren't like for like: CTM includes no numbers or minutes, and Infinity and Mediahawk charge per call on top. The UK-based providers are priced for larger businesses and agencies, and Ruler in particular is a different kind of product (an attribution platform you'd buy for a marketing team, not a tool a plumber buys to see which calls came from Google).
The mobile number line is the one I'd want you to notice. WhatConverts is the only one here that confirms UK mobile numbers. CallRail, Mediahawk and Ruler have confirmed they can't provide them, and CTM and Infinity don't say either way.
The reason I actually use it
The bit that matters is that WhatConverts lets you say what each lead was worth after the fact.
Inside the platform every lead can be marked as qualified or not qualified, and given a sales value when it turns into a customer. Then, and this is the important part, that information can be sent back into Google Ads as a conversion.
So instead of telling Google "get me more form submissions", you're telling it "get me more of the ones that turned into £800 jobs". Google's bidding is only as good as the signal you give it. Give it qualified leads and sales values and it starts finding more of those. Give it raw form fills and it will cheerfully find you more tyre kickers.
When it's set up properly, this is what I see on accounts within a couple of months:
- Cost per qualified lead comes down, usually noticeably, because Google stops paying for the enquiries that never go anywhere
- Wasted spend becomes visible. Keywords that produce calls but never produce customers show up for the first time, and get cut
- Automated bidding gets better and more stable, because it's learning from real outcomes rather than form fills
- Campaigns that looked like the stars turn out to be average once quality is factored in, and quieter campaigns turn out to be the ones making the money
That last one happens almost every time, and it's usually the point where the client stops thinking of Google Ads as a lead machine and starts thinking of it as a sales channel.
How I set it up with Google Ads
My standard setup is the same on most accounts.
- Install WhatConverts through Google Tag Manager, with call tracking on every phone number and form tracking on every form.
- Check it's actually capturing campaign and search term data on both calls and forms. This is where most installs fall down, and I'll come back to it.
- Agree with the client what "qualified" means. Not "sounded interested". Something concrete, like booked in, quote sent, application submitted.
- The client marks leads in WhatConverts as qualified, and adds a sales value when one closes. Sometimes I do this with them for the first few weeks.
- Connect WhatConverts to Google Ads so that qualified leads and sales values come through as conversion actions, separate from the raw lead action.
- Once there's enough data, move campaigns to bid on the qualified action or on conversion value, not on raw leads.
Step 6 is where the results come from, but it only works if steps 2 to 4 are done properly. Which brings me to the examples.
Four things I've seen it do
These are all real accounts I manage. I've taken the names out and rounded the numbers.
1. The repair business that only counts bookings
A local repair business gets most of its enquiries by phone. We set WhatConverts up so that only leads marked as booked get sent to Google Ads. Not enquiries, not quotes, bookings. The client marks a lead as qualified when it's in their booking system and nothing else.
That gave me six months of search terms with real booked value against each one: around £38,000 of spend producing just over £100,000 of booked work. I rebuilt the search campaigns into three tiers banded by value per booking, with the highest-value terms getting the most aggressive targets, and bid every campaign to the WhatConverts booking action.
The thing I'd flag from this account is the opposite lesson too. A few months in, the client changed how they marked leads, setting them to pending with a value first and only flipping to qualified later. Google Ads data stopped matching their own reports and I had to go back and sort it out. Lead tracking is only as good as the discipline behind it.
2. The recruitment client whose data arrived three weeks late
A seasonal recruitment business had WhatConverts capturing every application, and the qualified data was being sent to Google Ads. The problem was that the qualified status lived in a third-party applicant system, and someone had to copy it across by hand. By the time a lead was marked qualified it could be three weeks old.
That's too slow to bid on. Google needs conversions inside its attribution window, so we ran the campaigns on the raw application action while I worked on automating the handoff from the applicant system into WhatConverts, so leads get marked qualified the same day their status changes.
The lesson is that the qualified signal has to be timely as well as accurate. A perfect signal that arrives a month late is no use for bidding.
3. The tracking that broke without anyone noticing
A leak detection company's site had WhatConverts call tracking working nicely for months. Then their web developer replaced the phone number in the header with a "Call Now" button. Cosmetically fine. But the dynamic number swap only works on a phone number it can find, so from that day every call from the header was invisible to tracking.
Nobody noticed for a while because calls were still coming in. The Google Ads data just quietly got thinner. I only caught it because cost per qualified lead had been drifting up and I went looking for why.
If you take one thing from this post: check your call tracking every time the site changes. A monthly test call from a Google Ads click takes two minutes.
4. The calls that didn't count
A client had a rule set up so that only calls over 30 seconds counted as conversions. Sensible on the face of it, filtering out wrong numbers. Except their office often missed calls and rang people back, and a missed call is zero seconds long. Some of their best leads were being excluded from the data Google was optimising on.
We changed it so every call was recorded and the client marked the good ones as qualified instead. Performance improved within a few weeks, and we hadn't touched a single campaign setting. We'd just fixed the data.
The one thing most setups get wrong
Forms. On a lot of accounts WhatConverts is set up for calls and the forms are left to Google Ads' own conversion tracking. That means when the client looks at a form lead they can see it came from Google Ads but not which campaign or search term, so there's no way to trace a bad batch of enquiries back to what caused them.
If WhatConverts is capturing the form properly it has all of that. If it isn't, add hidden fields to the form via Tag Manager to carry the campaign and search term through. Either way, every lead should be traceable to the click that caused it. That's the whole point.
What it costs and who it's for
WhatConverts is priced in US dollars, month to month, with no contract. The entry Call Tracking plan is $30 a month, but the one most of my clients need is Plus at $60 a month (roughly £45 to £50), because that's the one with form tracking and the Google Ads integration. Tracking numbers and call minutes are billed on top, with a usage credit included, and in practice a UK small business with a handful of numbers and a few hundred calls a month tends to land somewhere around £60 to £100 a month all in. Pricing correct as of October 2026.
Every plan starts with a 14-day free trial, and if you book the onboarding call during the trial they extend it to 30 days. That's worth doing, because a month is enough time to see real qualified lead data come through rather than a handful of test calls. The call itself is quick. If your setup has no issues it's five or ten minutes, and if there is something wrong they'll take you through the setup themselves. You can start the free trial here (affiliate link).
Put that against the ad spend. A business spending £3,000 a month on Google Ads is paying about 2% of its budget to find out which half of that spend is working. On the repair account in example 1, the tracking cost over six months was a rounding error against £38,000 of spend, and it's what let me cut the terms that produced enquiries but never bookings and move the money to the ones that did. On the account in example 4, the improvement came from fixing the data alone, with no extra ad spend at all.
I've never had a client cancel it once they've seen the first month of qualified lead data. The far more common conversation is "why weren't we doing this before".
It's the right tool if:
- You generate leads rather than e-commerce sales
- A meaningful share of your leads come by phone
- Lead quality varies a lot and you want Google to tell the difference
- You're on automated bidding, or want to be
It's probably overkill if you're an online shop with no phone number, or if you get five leads a month and know each one personally.
Is WhatConverts worth it?
For lead generation accounts, yes. It's not clever or complicated. It does one job, which is telling you and Google which leads were worth having, and it does it reliably. Most of the biggest improvements I've made to client accounts over the last few years haven't come from campaign changes. They've come from fixing the data the campaigns were optimising on, and WhatConverts is usually the tool that made that possible.
Frequently asked questions
Does WhatConverts work with Google Ads?
Yes. It has a direct Google Ads integration that sends leads, qualified leads and sales values through as conversion actions, which you can then bid on. It also integrates with GA4, Microsoft Ads and most CRMs.
Is WhatConverts better than CallRail?
They do similar things. I've used both and settled on WhatConverts mainly because its lead qualification and value tracking are simpler for clients to actually use, and the Google Ads integration handles qualified leads and values cleanly. If your team already uses CallRail and marks leads properly, there's no urgent reason to switch.
Do I need a developer to install it?
No. If you have Google Tag Manager it's a tag and a trigger. If you don't, it's a script in the site header. The harder part is the ongoing bit: someone marking leads as qualified consistently.
What if my client won't mark leads?
Then you don't get the benefit, and it's worth being honest about that up front. I usually agree a simple definition of qualified, show them where to click, and check the first few weeks myself. Once they see Google start finding better leads it tends to stick.
Can it send sales values, not just qualified leads?
Yes. You can attach a value to any lead and send it through as conversion value, which lets you use Maximise Conversion Value or target ROAS bidding on a lead gen account. That's where the biggest gains usually are.
Is there a free trial?
Yes. Every plan comes with a 14-day free trial, and WhatConverts extends it to 30 days once you've had the onboarding call. The call takes five to ten minutes if your setup is clean, and if it isn't they'll walk you through fixing it.
Does it work in the UK?
Yes. UK tracking numbers are available, including local numbers and mobile numbers, and I use it on UK accounts across finance, home services, recruitment and legal.
If you want to try it, you can start a 14-day free trial of WhatConverts here (affiliate link), and book the onboarding call to have it extended to 30 days. And if you'd like help setting it up on your Google Ads account, or want someone to look at whether your campaigns are optimising for the right thing, get in touch.
