Pay For Performance With Call Only Campaigns
Call only campaigns allow advertisers to pay for performance, specifically only when their ad results in a phone call. For a good salesperson, a phone call is all you need to seal the deal.
Does your current advertising support that?
Much of digital advertising, and in particular, search advertising, is centered around getting users online to click on your ad. That is the essence of this style of marketing. Typically a clicked ad will take a user through to your website. Once there, the business goal is to convert them online through irresistible offers presented on well-optimized landing pages.
But what if getting users to visit your site isn’t your primary goal? What if your business could really benefit from some other objective, such as say, inbound calls?
Phone calls are a great way for potential customers to interact with your business. Calls allow users to get a very personal interaction with your business, offer you an even better chance of conversion. Alright, so how do you build a campaign to drive phone calls? AdWords beat you to it: call only campaigns.
Let’s have a look.
Benefits of Call Only Campaigns
Beyond personal aspect of calls, this type of interaction can boost your business in a whole host of ways. By taking advantage of AdWords’ flexible scheduling, you can set up your ads to show only when your business can (or wants to) receive calls. This alleviates any worries of missing an a potential customer call that you would otherwise have to pay for.
For instance, if you deliver food, but want people to order over the phone and are only open 9am – 11pm every day, you don’t want someone clicking on your ad at 3 in the morning.
AdWords users who also take advantage of conversion tracking will be happy to know they can set calls as a conversion type. Doing this in tandem with a call only campaign will enables advertisers to track ROI very directly and precisely.
Another advantage of call only campaigns is that a website is not required to benefit from them. Unlike a traditional pay per click campaign, clicks on call only ads result directly in phone calls. For a good salesperson, sometimes it only takes one call!
How Call Only Campaigns Work
Call only campaigns create ads that are configured to only show to users on mobile devices capable of making calls. Taps on these ads will only generate calls as opposed to visits to a website. These ads are flexible in their appearance. To optimize for mobile and enhance performance, they may not show all of the text you put in for them. In that same vein, some extensions may be hidden as well to make the most of the space each ad has on a mobile screen.
Here are a few more points worth knowing about call-only campaigns work:
You can share your business’s phone numbers across ads within an ad group or an entire campaign.
- Clicks on your number cost the same as headline clicks on a normal ad. (Standard CPC)
- Call-only campaigns are not yet available for campaigns targeting the display network.
- When you create a new ad in your call-only campaign, you’ll be asked to enter a phone number for your business. In order to verify your ad and number, Google will ask for a verification URL, which should lead to page that displays your phone number.
Keeping these three things in mind will help you be even more successful should you decide call only campaigns are right for your business.
Call Only Campaigns – Bidding and Reporting
Once you have your new call only campaign up and running, there’s a few things you’ll want to know about bidding and reporting for call only.
Because call only campaigns force clicks to call, you’re able to bid for calls to your business instead of clicks to your website. This means your CPC bid should match the value you would place on a phone call from your ad. The default bid strategy is maximize clicks, or in this case, calls. If you’ve set up conversion tracking for calls, you can use maximize conversions. You can also use target CPA (cost per acquisition) bidding.
Calls from your ads will appear under the “Clicks” column in your reporting table for each call-only campaign.
Conclusion
Call only campaigns can be a great tool for advertisers who prefer more personal interaction with their customers over sending users to their website. Though geared toward calls, they function much in the same way as traditional AdWords campaigns, if a little simpler. If your business can handle calls, they could be worth a try.
Happy Marketing!
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Ricky Noel is a Google AdWords Certified AdWords Professional, a proud employee of eBiz, ROI. as well as a full-time student at SUNY Geneseo, where he studies English, Education, and Theater. Ricky got into the internet marketing industry when his father, Rick, introduced him to Google AdWords and showed him the possibilities online advertising represented for business owners and web-users alike. Ricky began working with eBiz in the summer of 2016, between senior year of highschool and shipping off to college. Since then, he has worked remotely from school thanks to the wonders of Google Hangouts and high speed internet connectivity. His passions include reading, writing creatively and analytically, and performing in plays and musicals. He is also an experienced Dungeons and Dragons aficionado, holds Abraham Lincoln and George R.R. Martin among his personal heroes, and is really excited to help businesses grow and spread their message online.
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