'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 in the conversion column for calls. Ask the agency and the answer is almost always the same: “call tracking doesn’t work in the Netherlands.” That’s true. Half of it.
What doesn’t work in the Netherlands?
Google’s own call tracking runs on forwarding numbers: Google shows a temporary number in your ad, the call goes through Google, and Google counts it. Those forwarding numbers aren’t available in the Netherlands.
We checked. Over 90 days, Google’s report for calls from ads read zero on all seven Dutch accounts we manage, including one where the call button demonstrably showed in the ads. On our Belgian accounts the same report shows thousands of impressions and real calls.
Why does Google still let you set it up?
This is the part that costs money. Google Ads lets you create a “calls from ads” conversion on a Dutch account without an error. The account’s call-reporting setting even reads as switched on. We found three Dutch accounts with exactly that conversion in place, all at zero since the day it was created.
So “we’ve turned on call conversions” can look like a fix and never produce a number. Meanwhile Smart Bidding optimises toward the conversions it can see. If the call is invisible, the bidder steers toward whatever does get measured: a stray form, a directions click, a PDF download.
What can you measure instead?
The phone-number click on your website. Every tel: link on your site can be measured. One trigger in your tag manager fires on a click to one of those links and does two things at once: an event for your analytics, and a conversion back to Google Ads (type webpage, category phone call lead, one per click). From then on the bidder has a phone intent to steer toward. We did this for a taxi company we work with. No magic, just making a click measurable that was already happening.
The taps on the call button in your ad. Someone who taps the number straight from the search results never visits your site, so the website click never sees them. Google does log those taps, in its own “clicks to call” conversion. That one usually sits outside your main Conversions column, so hardly anyone looks at it. On that same taxi account, over the 30 days to 6 November 2026, the website logged 41 phone clicks while the call button in the ads was tapped 84 times. Look only at your website conversion and you miss twice as many people who wanted to call.
Keep the two apart in your reporting. Added together they look neat, but they’re different moments and you lose the view of where people actually call from.
What has to change before February 2027?
Call-only ads, the ad type that shows nothing but a call button, are on their way out. Since February 2026 you can’t create new ones, and from February 2027 the existing ones stop running. The replacement is a regular search ad with a call asset. If your account still leans on a call-only campaign, build the new setup next to it now and switch once it performs at least as well. Don’t wait for the old one to switch off.
What do you have to be honest about?
A tel: click isn’t a call, and neither is a tap on the call button. It’s the intent to call, not proof that someone got through. It’s a proxy. That’s no reason to skip it, because a proxy beats bidding blind by a wide margin, but you treat it as what it is. You don’t call clicks leads.
On every Dutch account where the phone matters, this is the first thing we check: is the phone measured at all, does a conversion sit at zero for good, and are both call signals visible. Surprisingly often the answer to the first question is “not at all.” Checking it takes half an hour and costs nothing.