Mountain View, California — Search engine behemoth Google as of late, has been moving forward in full swing, unveiling location-sensitive mobile features week after week. Today it added another to its arsenal: The Mountain View, Calif., company has just announced the integration of “Click-To-Call” feature in AdWords that allows users and advertisers to find each other via mobile ads, through a clickable local phone number to paid search ads seen on Android, iPhone, WebOS and other smart-phones with full Internet browsers, said Surojit Chatterjee, a product manager in Google’s Mobile Ads Team, in a blog post.
The feature allows a phone user to initiate a call to the advertiser instantly, just like the same way as the person would click through to the company’s Web site. The phone number is displayed as an additional line of text in the mobile paid-search ad more likely at the bottom or top of the search query page. This suggests that when you see a business phone number on a mobile ad for a particular establishment, you can simply tap on the phone number and make the call.
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The feature is pretty handy in situations where you are searching for a place, like a restaurant, and want to call ahead to make a reservation. To make this even more effective is the fact that mobile web search is location-enabled. So much so that the numbers provided are also based on the phone number listing of a particular establishment nearest to your current location. That pretty much saves you the trouble of calling a phone number only to find out that the business establishment is miles away from you.
For an advertiser, the cost of a click-to-call is the same as the cost of a click to visit its Web site. Advertisers can verify the response rates via calls through their ads in the same way they can track clicks. Advertisers will be able to see how many calls originate from the ads in the campaign summary in their AdWords account.
Mobile phones working on Google’s Android or Apple’s operating system support the ad service. Advertisers interested in Google’s new click to call feature should read this post over at the Inside AdWords blog.
This is not the first time Google is offering click-to-call services. This new click-to-call mobile ads is released barely a week after Google unveiled optimized search suggestions based on location and three weeks after “Near me now,” a feature that shows nearby places once your location is determined.
Google is among a handful of Internet players contending for leadership in the potentially significant mobile advertising market steadily keeps improving its local search features over the past year in recognition that mobile devices are becoming an increasingly powerful gateway to its properties. To capture the market, it recently purchased AdMob, a mobile display-ad technology provider. Also, earlier this month, Apple bought mobile ad company Quattro. Microsoft and Yahoo are also working to secure footholds in the market.
Below is a video demonstrating how click to call phone numbers are used in mobile ads: