Google’s AdWords online campaign program is the most popular online advertising platform for business large and small. In February 2015, Google signaled the resurgence of Pay Per Call advertising by launching a new call-only ad option for users. In this post, we’re going to discuss a few steps to help you get the most out of the new call-only campaigns on AdWords.
Call Length
One of the most important factors in any Pay Per Call campaign is the value of call length. What constitutes a valuable phone call is different from one industry to the next. For example, if you’re a small insurance firm, you aren’t going to sell a new policy to anyone in just 60 seconds. However, an auto repair shop could achieve its goal of setting appointments for service in just one minute.
- When you’re setting up a new call-only ad, select the “Phone Call Conversions” tab, then select the “Calls from ads using call extensions” options. This allows you to alter the length of a call for conversion purposes.
- AdWords starts with 60 seconds by default. Keep in mind, you may want to add time to your estimated conversion time on a valuable call to cover customers sitting on hold, transferring, and navigating through you automated response system (if applicable).
Optimize Your Ads
Next, you need to optimize your campaign for greater effect. You can start by scheduling the run time for your call-only ads. Few businesses would consider a call that goes to voicemail a valuable one, so make sure your call-only ads are scheduled to appear during business hours so that it appears during time windows when you have sufficient staffing to answer the phones.
It is also important to understand the relationship between call-only ads and mobile preferred ads. The two don’t directly compete against one another for space, but they will appear in the same ad space at times. You may need to bid higher on your call-only ads to get them to appear if your mobile preferred ads have a greater historic data collection.
Read More: 7 Google Adwords Mistakes to Avoid
To further differentiate between your call-only and mobile preferred ads, consider adding phone-call centric modifiers to your targeted keywords. These will help improve the click-to-call rates on your call-only ads and help downplay the competition between your two ad types.
Reporting Modifiers
Last but not least, Google AdWords isn’t setup by default to display data from call-only ads and Google call extensions.
- If you look under “Custom Columns” and “Dimensions” you’ll find the information you need. Under the former you can add columns to your reports that provide data such as phone impressions, calls, and more. Using the latter you can select “Call details” and learn about the average call length, area codes, and connectivity of each call (answered or missed).
Follow these steps as you are putting together your call-only ads on Google AdWords and you’ll find your experience much more profitable in the long run.