# The bookings you lose when nobody can answer the phone

> Clients ring while your hands are in colour. How to count the calls you are actually missing, for free, before you buy any more of them.

Source: https://salonadsstudio.com/blog/the-bookings-you-lose-when-nobody-can-answer-the-phone/  
Author: The Salon Ads Studio  
Published: 2026-09-08

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You cannot know how many bookings you have lost to a phone nobody picked up. Anyone who quotes you a figure is guessing, or selling you an answering service. What you can find out, for nothing, is how many calls go unanswered and when. If you run a Google search ad with your number on it, Google's own call report records the time each call came in and whether it was missed or received. That count comes before spending another pound on clicks.

## Nobody can tell you what a missed call costs

Search this question and you will mostly get companies selling an answering service, with big percentages and dollar figures on the page. We are not repeating any of them here. We have not read a primary source for a single one, most of them are American, and a made up number about your salon is worse than no number at all.

Here is what is true without any research. A call that rings out at two o'clock on a Saturday is not automatically a lost client. Some ring back that evening. Some were a rep. Some tried you, then tried the salon two doors down while they were still standing on the pavement. You do not know which, and neither does anybody selling you software. The answerable question is smaller and much more useful: how many calls actually go unanswered, and at what times of day.

## What Google will tell you for free, if you already run ads

Switch on call reporting in your account settings and Google puts a forwarding number on your ad, routes the call through to your real line, and keeps a record of it. Where it can, the forwarding number carries your own area code. The United Kingdom is on Google's list of countries where those numbers are available.

Then add the call details columns in your account. For every call you get the start and end time, whether the call was missed or received, the caller's area code and the call type. Missed or received. That is the fact this entire question turns on, and on most salon accounts it is already sitting there unread.

The tap itself costs what a tap costs. When someone presses the number on your ad you pay for a click, the same price as if they had clicked through to your website. You are not charged when somebody dials that forwarding number by hand later on.

![The five steps of one call from a salon ad, showing where the record of a missed call stops](/images/blog/nobody-can-answer-the-phone-where-the-record-stops.svg "Google records everything up to the moment the ringing stops. What she does next is nobody's data, including ours.")

## Read your own report honestly

Two things trip people up here, and both are worth knowing before you draw any conclusion from the numbers.

A phone call and a conversion are not the same thing. You choose the length of call that counts as a conversion. Google's own worked example: set it to 30 seconds, take a call lasting 26 seconds, and the account shows one phone call and no conversions.

![A 26 second salon call against a 30 second setting, counted as one phone call and no conversion](/images/blog/nobody-can-answer-the-phone-call-not-conversion.svg "Set the length too long and a genuine call vanishes from the column you are judging your ads by.")

The dates do not line up either. Phone calls are reported on the day they happen, while call conversions are reported on the day of the ad click. And calls somebody dialled by hand are counted for campaigns and ad groups, but not for individual keywords or ads.

Then the honest limit. The report knows the call was missed. It does not know whether she rang back at six, and it will never know whether she booked somewhere else. Nobody can tell you that, which is why our own monthly report counts calls, form enquiries and booking click-outs and stops there. Those three can be counted. A bookings figure would be a guess wearing a number's clothes.

![A woman on her phone outside a lit salon window at dusk on a wet high street](/images/blog/nobody-can-answer-the-phone-hero-03.jpg)

## Give the enquiry somewhere to land that is not a ringing phone

The next part is free and takes about ten minutes. Your Google Business Profile can carry up to ten links per category, and one of the things those links exist for is booking an appointment. You add them from the Booking section on Search, or from Edit profile on Maps, paste the address of your booking page, and save. If you end up with more than one, you can set a preferred link and it sits at the top of the list as your business preferred.

Worth checking while you are in there: Google says links to certain services can appear on your profile automatically, put there by third party partners or by automated data from Google. So there may already be a booking link on your listing that is not yours, quietly taking the enquiry you could not answer at two o'clock and running it through somebody else's commission. You can set your own as the preferred one, or remove a provider from the same Booking section, and Google says providers have to act on a removal request within five days.

![A telephone handset and an open paper appointment book on an empty salon reception counter](/images/blog/nobody-can-answer-the-phone-hero-06.jpg)

## Do not buy more calls than you can answer

If the honest answer is that nobody can pick up between ten and four, stop paying to show a phone number between ten and four. Google builds that in: you can set numbers to appear only when your business can accept calls, and under the advanced options on a call asset you can schedule it to show only on certain days and hours, in Google's own words only when your business is answering phone calls.

This is not a saving, and it should not be sold to you as one. Clicks on a call asset cost the same as clicks on your headline. Showing the number at nine in the evening and sending that person to a booking page at nine in the evening cost you the same. The difference is only which one gets answered, and at nine in the evening it is not the phone.

One thing not to confuse with it: narrowing the hours on the whole campaign is a different lever and it does not do what most people expect. We went through that in [how to fill the quiet midweek days](/blog/how-to-fill-the-quiet-midweek-days-in-your-salon).

## What to do this week

Switch on call reporting, add the call details columns, and leave it a week. Then look at missed against received with the times beside them, and you will know whether you have a phone problem, a demand problem or neither. Put a booking link on your free Google listing while you wait, and make it the preferred one.

Only then decide about buying more clicks. One salon, one month, on £300 of spend: 38 calls, 21 enquiries, £14 an enquiry. More of that is worth having, but only if something happens when it arrives. We fix the free listing side before you pay us anything, and the assessment reads your local numbers back to you before there is an account or a card involved.

## Frequently asked questions

### Why would my ad be disapproved for an unverified phone number?

Google checks that the number belongs to the business being advertised. It has to be written in the strict international format with no spaces, and that exact number must either appear in your website's source code or your domain must be verified in Search Console. Otherwise the ad is disapproved.

### Does my number show on every single one of my ads?

No, and that is normal. Call assets do not appear with every impression: when the auction runs, an algorithm decides which assets to show based on past performance and other factors. Google says showing on only a subset of impressions is completely normal, and bid adjustments can make call interactions show more often.

### Can I put a call number on a Smart campaign as well?

Yes. Call assets run on Search campaigns and Smart campaigns, and you can add them at account, campaign or ad group level. The most specific one wins: an ad group asset shows instead of a campaign one, and a campaign asset overrides an account one.

### Will I still see who is ringing me?

Yes. Caller ID still works on calls routed through a Google forwarding number, with an exception Google notes for some calls in India and Japan. The report also keeps the caller's phone number for calls lasting more than 15 seconds, again with India excepted.