'Call tracking doesn't work in the Netherlands' — and what it costs your bidding.
Take a taxi company. The whole business runs on the phone. Someone searches, clicks, calls, and is in a cab twenty minutes later. No form, no shopping cart. One phone call is the conversion.
Open the Google Ads account and you’ll often see… nothing. No phone conversion in the column. Ask the agency and the answer is almost always the same: “call tracking doesn’t work in the Netherlands.” And that’s true. Half of it.
What’s true. Google’s own call tracking, the forwarding numbers that measure your calls, isn’t available here. It works in the US, the UK, and Australia, but not in the Netherlands. So the easy move is to shrug and leave the phone unmeasured. The problem is what that does to your bidding. Smart Bidding optimises toward the conversions it can see. If the action that actually matters, the call, is invisible, the bidder steers toward whatever does happen to get measured: a stray form, a directions click, a PDF download. You’re paying for an algorithm that optimises hard toward the wrong goal.
The honest proxy. What you can measure is the phone-number click. Every tel: link is something you can measure. You set one trigger in your tag manager that fires on a click to one of those links, and have it do two things at once: a measurement event for your analytics, and a conversion signal back to Google Ads (type webpage, category phone lead, one per click). From that moment the bidder has a phone intent to steer toward. We did this for a taxi company up north. No magic, just making a click measurable that was already happening.
What you have to be honest about. A tel: click isn’t a call. It’s the intent to call, not proof that a call happened. It’s a proxy. That’s no reason to skip it, because a proxy signal beats bidding blind by a wide margin, but you treat it as what it is. You don’t call clicks leads.
The audit version. On every phone-driven Dutch account, this is the first thing we check: is the phone being measured at all, and if it is, does it count as intent or as a call? Surprisingly often the answer is “not at all.” Checking it takes half an hour and costs nothing.