Google ads that aim to get buyers to pick up the phone are on hold — at least for now… Instead, the company is focusing on other types of ads, including ads sent to cell phone users and pay-per-action ads.
“Google launched a pay-per-call program — it calls it “click-to-call” on trial that will come to halt after December 3, 2007.”
If a consumer clicks on a click-to-call ad they are instructed to enter their phone number. Google then calls the consumer’s phone number and connects the person to the advertiser. Google pays for the call and collects a fee for the lead from the advertiser…
But Google’s attempt to include phone calls in its ad service has not been as successful. With pay-per-call ads, an advertiser pays each time a consumer calls the company after seeing an ad posted on Google or its partner Web sites.
Pay-per-call is not a priority for now, says Nick Fox, Google’s director of business product management.
“Our focus has been more on things like pay-per-action and less on the pay-per-call area,” he said. “We have run some tests on pay-per-call to see what the optimal advertising and user experience is there, but we do not have anything specific to announce around that yet.”
Here are the answers to some frequent questions about the end of the click-to-call ads trial.
If you have active click-to-call ad campaigns, they will stop running completely after December 3, 2007. Google wants to find new sources of revenue apart from its text-based pay-per-click ads.
Google would not say how many advertisers have signed up for the click-to-call service.
Fox says the company is still wrestling over a few issues with pay-per-call. “The key things are, for what set of (online search) queries does it make sense, and is the user really interested in calling an advertiser vs. visiting a Web site?” he said.
But if statistics from click-to-call ads show that you have already run (including clicks, impressions, and CPC) will still be included in your reports until January 9, 2008.
Ingenio, a Web Services Company that AT&T this week announced it would buy, has been offering pay-per-call to advertisers since 1999. It offers pay-per-call ads that run on several Web sites, including Time Warner’s AOL.
“Ingenio executives say pay-per-call is best suited for small businesses that prefer dealing with customers over the phone.”
But Google says that click-to-call ads trial was an experiment designed to measure advertiser interest and user adoption. The experiment has ended, and we will use the results to improve AdWords and build more solutions for advertisers who value phone calls.
With pay-per-call, advertisers get the power of the Web while still connecting with customers on the phone, says Marc Barach, Ingenio’s chief marketing officer.
“There is a tremendous appetite among advertisers to buy phone calls in order to reach these consumers who are searching for products online,” he said.
However, if you were offered a credit for participating in the click-to-call trial, it will appear in your account by December 31, 2007. The credit will reflect any amount you spent on click-to-call ads up to the total amount of credit offered.
Pay-per-call is just getting started, but research firm Kelsey Group says pay-per-call ad revenue in the U.S. in 2009 will top $4 billion. By comparison, all paid search ad revenue in the U.S. surpassed $4 billion in the first half of this year, and is growing at a more than 40% per year clip, says a recent report by the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Most consumers and advertisers have not embraced pay-per-call though it seems to work, says Bill Leake, chief executive of Apogee Search, a marketing technology company that helps companies advertise online.
“The qualities of the leads that come from pay-per-call are typically great,” he said. “It is just that there are not a lot of them.”
Google’s Fox says the company might give pay-per-call more attention as it boosts efforts to get ads to mobile users.
“It may make much more sense in the mobile space,” he said.