Mountain View, California — Google generates a lot of money from advertising, and now it is waging an all out war with Apple to be the most innovative in the mobile space, especially in the advertising arena. The search giant’s latest maneuver in its mobile push: The company recently sent AdWords advertisers a message this week that it would display their business phone numbers in ads that show up on some smartphones — and then charge advertisers when users click on the number in order to call them.
SearchEngineLand, which first revealed that AdWords clients received an interesting notification stated that sometime later this month “your location-specific business phone number will display alongside your destination url in ads that appear on high-end mobile devices. Users will be able to click-to-call your business just as easily as they click to visit your website. Advertisers will be charged for clicks to call, same as you are for clicks to visit your website.”
Google Sponsored Links as shown currently on the iPhone
Google organic results currently show business phone number
The phone number and the nearest address will show-up as a fifth line of ad text. Visitors can click-to-call the business just as comfortably as they click to visit their website. AdWords advertisers will be able to track click-to-call calls in the Campaign Summary page within AdWords from the “click type” segment option under the “Filter and Views” drop down.
Presently, Google already offers click-to-call in their organic results but not within their “Sponsored Links”.
“This is a version of “pay-per-phone call” but the cost per call is the similar as a click — a bargain… for the advertisers to receive a warm lead,” writes Search Engine Land’s Greg Sterling. Instead of viewing an advertisement and having to memorize the number in the ad, users can now select and call a phone number from within the browser. The concept is that this is the easiest way to respond to a mobile ad.
The click-to-call campaign is one of many forward-looking ideas that Google will be likely appearing with as Android gains mass adoption. This is all good news for mobile advertisers and marketers — with Google in the game, advertising and marketing becomes a bigger part of the “mobile success” picture. No longer are hardware, phone contracts, and apps sales enough. This will push Apple to stretch their own mobile advertising curiosity to compete, already seen in their just confirmed $2.5M acquisition of Quattro Wireless.
It is not clear how broadly the initiative is for now since Google says it only applies to unspecified “high-end mobile devices” but it is easy to see how this could become an important revenue stream, as the adoption of smartphones grows.