Google Business Profile calls in Google Ads: count them as conversions or report only?

Take an emergency plumber where a good share of calls come from the Business Profile, not the ad. Those calls never touch the Ads account, so the campaign can look like it's underperforming while the owner's phone log says otherwise. The obvious fix is to import profile calls as a conversion, but I'm not sure that's clean. If someone clicks the ad on Monday and calls from the listing on Tuesday, which action gets the credit? And bidding might start chasing people who would have called you anyway. My lean is to keep profile calls as a reporting view and only bid on calls that start from the ad itself. Some people import everything and are fine with it, though. Where do you draw the line when the same caller touches both?

Depends on what searches those profile calls come from. If most are branded searches, the person would have called anyway, so bidding on them just pays for demand you already had. If they come from generic searches like "emergency plumber near me," that's demand the campaign is missing, and importing them makes a lot more sense.

I'm not sure the search term tells you much about incrementality. A generic query like "emergency plumber near me" often shows your ad and your map pin side by side, so the person may have clicked the ad, looked at the listing, and then called from the profile. That call is demand the ad already reached, not demand the campaign is missing. The query only tells you what they typed, not what they saw first. Honestly, the cleaner test is to watch profile call volume in weeks or areas where the ad runs lower and see whether those calls drop too.

If your budget runs out by mid-afternoon, you already have a natural version of that test. Compare profile calls after the cap hits against the same hours on days when the campaign stays live. Emergency call volume is noisy, so give it a few weeks before you trust the gap.

I'm not sure the cap test holds up. Late afternoon is peak demand, so those same hours on uncapped days aren't really comparable to the capped ones. A cleaner way is to pause the ads in one service area for a week and compare it against a similar area that stayed live.

Yeah, the cap comparison is muddied by the peak-hour effect. A safe way to handle it is to track profile calls as a secondary conversion and keep them out of bidding until a geo pause shows they really drop. If you feed them in earlier, you're asking Google to optimize toward calls that might have come in anyway.