Your ad platform counts a phone call as a conversion the moment it connects - it has no way of knowing whether your intake desk actually answered, whether the caller hung up, or whether the call was even in your practice area.
Short answer
Paid campaigns that make the phone ring are only working if someone actually answers and the caller is worth pursuing. Missed calls, wrong-practice-area calls, and off-hours calls all register as "conversions" in most ad platforms even when nobody spoke to the caller. Firms that track answer rate and disposition, not just ring volume, stop optimizing campaigns toward noise.
The situation
Your ad platform counts a phone call as a conversion the moment it connects - it has no way of knowing whether your intake desk actually answered, whether the caller hung up, or whether the call was even in your practice area.
The pain
Campaigns get optimized toward whatever makes the phone ring, which can mean paying more for calls nobody answers or calls that were never going to become clients - and the platform has no incentive to tell you that.
What we implement
We connect your call tracking platform to intake's own call log so every tracked call carries an answered-or-missed status and a disposition - what's called call and intake disposition tracking - rather than stopping at a connection event.
What you get
Ad spend decisions made on answered, qualified calls, not raw ring volume the platform counts as a win.
A concrete number for how many calls a campaign produced that intake never got to, so staffing and spend decisions can both get fixed.
Marketing budget shifted away from campaigns that reliably produce unanswerable call volume.
Illustrative: a multi-office firm whose after-hours call volume looks strong in the ad platform might find that intake never answered a third of those calls - illustrative scenario. Whether that pattern holds at any given firm is a fact the reconciliation measures, not something assumed here.
Common questions
Is this the same as call tracking?
Call tracking tells you a call happened and where it came from. Disposition tracking tells you what happened after it connected - answered, missed, qualified, retained.
Do you record the calls to determine disposition?
Not as part of this. See our page on call tracking without recording what clients say for how source-and-disposition tracking is kept separate from recording.
Know which cases your marketing actually produced.
A runtime audit of your firm's tracking: every tag, every call and intake integration, and whether the numbers your agency reports reconcile with the matters your firm opened. Evidence, not vibes.
We audit law-firm tracking for a living, so this site holds itself to the standard we audit against: no session recording or analytics runs here until you allow it. Essential functionality only, unless you opt in.