Many enquiries never touch a form: the visitor taps your phone number, opens an email, sends a text or starts a WhatsApp chat. Contact clicks count those taps by channel, source and campaign, beside your leads, so a phone-led business can see which marketing brings the calls.
A contact click is a click on a link, not a call or a message. TraceLead does not know whether the call connected or the email was sent. That is why clicks are a separate number and are never counted as leads or included in the conversion rate.
- What counts
- Switching it on
- Buttons that are not links
- What is sent and stored
- Where they show
- Privacy
What counts
| Link | Counted as |
|---|---|
<a href="tel:…"> |
Phone |
<a href="mailto:…"> |
|
<a href="sms:…"> |
SMS |
<a href="https://wa.me/…"> or https://api.whatsapp.com/… |
The click can land anywhere inside the link (an icon, a span). Other links, and look-alike addresses such as wa.me.example.com, are ignored. Each kind is counted once per visit: a visitor who taps your number three times in one visit is one phone click.
Switching it on
Contact clicks are off by default. On the site's page in TraceLead, open Settings → Data collection and tick Record contact clicks, then save. The snippet starts counting on the next page load (the site configuration is cached for up to five minutes). No change to your website is needed.
Clicks are counted only after the visitor allows storage, exactly like sessions and leads, and never on a paused or disabled site.
Buttons that are not links
Some click-to-call widgets are buttons that dial through JavaScript instead of a tel: link. Report those from your own code:
<button type="button" onclick="tracelead('contact', 'phone')">Call us</button>
The second argument must be phone, email, sms or whatsapp; anything else is ignored. Use the async stub from Installing the snippet if the button can be clicked before the snippet has loaded.
What is sent and stored
The snippet sends only the kind of link (phone, email, sms or whatsapp) with the same random visit ids, page path and first-touch attribution as a session. It never reads the number, address or message in the link, so none of them can leave the page. See What is sent to TraceLead for the exact request.
Stored per click: the kind, the page path it happened on, when, and the first-touch attribution (channel, source, medium, campaign, landing page and the other attribution columns). Clicks are deleted with the rest of the site's data after its retention period.
Where they show
- Dashboard and site overview: a Contact clicks figure beside Leads, and a Contacts column in the channel, source, campaign, landing page, referrer, keyword and ad content tables.
- Lead log: a Contact clicks tab listing each click with its attribution.
- Client reports and report emails: a Contact clicks figure and column.
- Daily lead summary emails: the day's contact clicks as a count.
- Reporting API:
contact_clicksin the stats totals and rows (Reporting API). - Webhooks: a
contact_click.createdevent, sent only to webhooks where you tick Contact click (Lead webhooks).
Contact clicks are not filled into your forms or sent to your CRM: there is no form submission to carry them.
Privacy
Recording contact clicks uses the same consent and the same pseudonymous visit ids as session collection. If you switch it on, mention it in your own privacy notice alongside your use of TraceLead, for example: "We count clicks on our phone, email and WhatsApp links by the advert or website that brought you, without recording who you are or which number you called."