Tracking numbers

A tracking number is an ordinary phone number that forwards to your real line. Which number a visitor sees depends on how they arrived, so the call itself carries the attribution.

Numbers are included with your paid plan. Choose the ones you want from inside Proofbell and add more whenever you need them — there is nothing to arrange elsewhere, and no separate bill to reconcile.

What the person answering sees

By default your team sees the caller's own number, exactly as if they had rung the office directly. On the Numbers page you can switch a website to show the tracking number they dialled instead.

Why anybody wants that: the number tells your team which advert produced the call before they answer. A different number on the van, in the Yellow Pages advert and on the Google campaign means whoever picks up already knows which one is ringing.

Pressing redial: what happens

If your team sees the tracking number, redial dials that number — which forwards straight back to your own office. So instead of connecting you to yourself, we connect you to the customer.

Ring the tracking number from the phone your calls forward to and you will hear the customer’s number read out, then the call starts ringing them. Which customer:

• The last call nobody answered, on that number, in the last four hours. That is almost always who you mean — if the last caller was answered and dealt with, ringing them back is the wrong conversation.
• If every recent call was answered, the most recent caller.
• Never a caller we blocked as spam, and never a withheld number, because there is nothing to dial.

The customer sees the tracking number, not your direct line. That matters more than it sounds: give them your direct line once and every call they make afterwards is invisible to your reporting.

Working through a list instead

There is a second rule you can choose on the numbers screen: whoever has not been rung back yet. It is for a team clearing a backlog of missed calls, where the default would hand the same person to two colleagues in a row.

Somebody whose callback rang out is not treated as dealt with. That distinction is the point of the rule rather than a detail of it. A returned call that nobody picked up means the customer still has not been reached, so they stay in the queue — behind everyone nobody has tried yet, so your team moves forward rather than redialling one number until it answers. Only a callback somebody actually answered takes them off the list.

We work this out from the returned calls already in your call log, so there is nothing to maintain and nothing that can disagree with what you can see there. And if every recent caller has been spoken to, the agent hears the explanation rather than being connected to a conversation that already happened.

How far back it looks, and turning it off

Four hours by default. On the Numbers page you can change it per website to today, since midnight — which is what people usually mean, and on an evening shift is a very different answer from four hours — or to the last 24 hours. You can also switch it off, in which case your team hears an explanation and nobody is connected, exactly as before this existed.

There is deliberately no “no limit” option. A week later a pool number may be working a different campaign, so the last caller on it would be somebody your team has never spoken to. Unbounded would not be generous; it would be a stranger on the line.

If there is nothing to return — nobody rang that number in the last four hours, or the only callers were withheld — you hear that, in those words, rather than being connected to somebody unrelated. The four-hour limit is deliberate: a week later a pool number may be working a different campaign, and the “last caller” would be a stranger.

Ringing back from a number local to them

People answer a local number more often than an unfamiliar one. If you hold tracking numbers in more than one dialling area, a returned call can show whichever of them is in the customer's own area rather than the one your colleague happened to ring. It is off by default, and it sits beside the redial settings on the numbers screen.

Only your permanently-assigned numbers are used — never a pool number. That is deliberate, and it is the one way this feature could quietly cost you data. A pool number is lent to one visitor at a time so their call can be credited to the marketing that brought them. Show it to somebody as caller ID and they may ring it back next week, by which point it belongs to a different visitor's session — and their call would be credited to a campaign they never saw. Nothing would look wrong; the call would simply be attributed to the wrong thing.

So if a project holds only one permanent number there is nothing to choose between, and turning this on changes no call. The screen says so with a count of your dialling areas rather than leaving you to wonder.

First, tell us where calls should ring

Every tracking number forwards to one real number of yours, set on the Numbers screen. Until it is set, a tracking number will ring and the caller will hear a short apology instead of reaching you — so do this before you put a tracking number on your website.

Your real number is never shown to visitors. They only ever see the tracking number.

That one number is the starting point, not the limit. A call flow can check your opening hours, ring several people at once or in turn, offer a keypad menu and take a message when nobody picks up. One flow is live per website at a time, and until you publish one and make it live every call rings the single number above regardless of the hour — see Call flows.

Which numbers can receive a forwarded call

Calls can be forwarded to a UK landline (01 or 02), a UK 03 number, or a UK mobile on 071–075 or 077–079. That covers every number a business actually answers on, and it applies wherever a destination is chosen — the forwarding number above, and every destination in a call flow ring group.

These are refused, and each refusal says which of these it is:

Range	Why
999, 112, 111, 101 and other service short codes	Emergency and public-service numbers cannot be used anywhere in Proofbell. A 999 call must reach the emergency network directly, and a forwarded one would present our location rather than the caller's — so it would reach the wrong control room even if it connected.
09 premium rate	Charged at up to 83p a minute, and the recipient is paid a share of it.
070 personal numbering	Not a mobile, despite starting 07 — it is charged at premium rates. This is the one people are surprised by. Use a standard mobile instead.
076 pagers	Cannot take a voice call.
084, 087 and other revenue-share ranges	The recipient is paid per minute by the caller's carrier.
Numbers outside the UK	Not yet supported. Ask us if you need calls forwarded to another country and we will quote for it.

A connected call is also capped at two hours, after which it is ended. This is a safety net against a call left open by accident rather than a limit you are meant to feel — it is roughly forty times the length of a typical tracked call.

Two ways to allocate them

This is the decision that determines both what you learn and what you pay, so it is worth understanding before you buy anything.

	One number per source	A number pool
How it works	Each channel or campaign gets its own permanent number.	Numbers are handed out per visitor and returned when the visit ends.
You learn	Channel and campaign.	Channel, campaign, and the keyword where the platform reports one.
Numbers needed	One per source. Typically 3–6.	One per concurrent visitor. Typically 6–30.
Cost	Low	Several times more

Before you buy a pool, check it can work

A pool's only advantage is keyword resolution. Google reports no keyword for Performance Max, Shopping, Display or Demand Gen clicks — so if most of your paid traffic is those, a pool costs several times more and delivers nothing extra.

The attribution screen tells you what share of your own clicks can carry a keyword, and will say plainly when a pool is not justified. More on that. That check is on every plan deliberately — it is the one report that tells you whether the tier above is worth buying.

Note also that the keyword-level report itself is on Scale, where the twenty included numbers make a pool viable in the first place. Below that, a pool would hand out numbers per visitor with no report to read the result in.

How many do I need?

For one number per source: one for each channel you want separated, plus one fallback. Four is a sensible start — paid search, organic, direct, and a spare.

For a pool, it depends on concurrency, not volume. What matters is how many people are on your site at the same time within the window a number is held, not how many visit per month. Proofbell measures this and recommends a size once you have real traffic, with a safety margin — guessing tends to produce either waste or exhaustion.

Several brands, locations or websites

Each of them is a website (a project, in the API), and one account holds as many as you like — up to 25. A website is where numbers, call flows and reports live, so each brand gets its own tracking numbers and its own reporting — and they all roll up to one invoice and one set of allowances. Add one from Add a website in the Admin menu at the foot of the sidebar, or from the Websites page, and switch between them with the website picker in the same menu. More on adding and renaming a website.

What you usually do not want is a second account for the same brand. That splits your reporting and your billing in half, and nothing adds the two halves back together. A second account is right when it is genuinely a second, separate company — its own plan, its own team, its own calls that must never mix with the first — and since 15 September 2026 a single-company plan can hold a few of those: your plan's current limit is shown on the Accounts screen, and is three as of today. Reaching for an account when what you have is a second branch of the same business is still the mistake this page exists to head off; see accounts and switching between them.

What happens if a pool runs out

The visitor is shown a shared fallback number. The call still reaches you — it is simply attributed less precisely, and those calls are marked coarse in your call log so you can see it happening rather than silently accepting worse data. Frequent exhaustion is a signal to add numbers.

What they cost, and the part that surprises people

• Numbers within your plan allowance are included.
• Beyond it, each is charged monthly at your plan's rate and appears on your next invoice. The rate is on the pricing page, and the app shows the cost before you confirm — the browsing list marks every candidate as inside your allowance or not, and names the monthly cost beside the button.
• On the free plan there is no overage rate, because there is no first number to go over.

The life of a number

bought ──▶ warm ──▶ assigned ──▶ quarantined ──(90 days)──▶ warm
                     (in use)      (billed, unusable)      (reusable)

• Warm — yours, ready to be handed out.
• Assigned — currently allocated to a visitor or a source.
• Quarantined — released, still billed, cannot be assigned. Shown as such in your account so the invoice makes sense.

Choosing the number itself

You browse a list rather than search for one. The numbers screen loads with candidates already on it — UK local numbers, in the dialling code we think you are in — because what almost everybody wants is "a local number for my business", and making somebody guess an area code before they see anything is the wrong first question.

That dialling code is inferred from the registered postcode you gave us when your business was verified, and the screen says so and which postcode it used.

A number in another country

We sell UK numbers today. If you need one somewhere else, ask — our carrier covers around twenty countries, and adding one is usually a matter of paperwork rather than engineering.

That paperwork is the real constraint, and it is worth knowing why. Most countries will not issue a phone number without proof of who is taking it and where they are — the UK included — and that proof is registered with the carrier per country and per kind of number before any number can be bought. So a new country is not a switch we flip: it is a submission somebody has to approve, and it takes days rather than minutes.

We ask the carrier before we take your money, not after. If the paperwork for a country is not in place, or the carrier does not offer that kind of number there at all, you get a sentence saying which and nothing is bought. The alternative — letting the purchase go through and be rejected — can charge you for a number you cannot use, and a number is billable for at least ninety days whether or not it ever rings.

The filter still works. Type any area code — 01242, 1242 and 0161 are all understood — and that is what you get. An area code you typed is never quietly widened: if there is no stock in it, the answer is an empty list, because that is the answer to the question you asked. A code we guessed is different — if it has no stock we search the whole country instead and tell you we did, since you asked for a number rather than for that code.

You can also filter by digits the number contains, and by type. A local number in the caller's own area is answered more often than an 0800, and matching your actual location is worth more than a memorable pattern.

Freephone (0800) numbers are available and cost more per month. They are worth it if your customers expect a national business; they are not worth it for a local trade. Area-code filtering does not apply to them — an 0800 number has no geography — so the inferred code is ignored when you ask for freephone.

Keeping a number

Numbers are allocated to you for use with the service rather than sold to you.