Measure the phone calls you get from AdWords

What if you found out that your AdWords campaigns were bringing you more customers than you realized?

Zac Stafford, Senior Search Strategist at Nina Hale Search Marketing in Minneapolis, MN, recently discovered that this was true for his client, modern furniture retailer Room & Board. Stafford saw some encouraging results as an early beta tester of AdWords call metrics, a new feature that automatically includes a unique phone number in your ads to measure the calls that you receive from AdWords.

“By cross-checking our call metrics reports with our sales records, we saw that half the people who called the toll free number in our ad purchased online but the other half purchased in a store. Before using call metrics, we determined our ROI just by looking at the online sales numbers. Now we have proof that online search ad campaigns drive in-store purchases.”

Today we're announcing that AdWords call metrics is available for more advertisers, making it easier than ever to measure the phone calls that AdWords generates for your business. Using the technology behind Google Voice, call metrics assigns your campaign a unique phone number which is automatically inserted into your ad on both desktop and high-end mobile devices, where the number is clickable.

Call metrics ad at the top of the search results:

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Call metrics at the right of the search results:

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When a user calls the number in your ad, the call is automatically routed to your business, and AdWords notes that this call took place. Then, when you look at your AdWords reports, you’ll see the number of calls generated by each campaign, call duration, and in the near future, caller area code. You'll still only pay for clicks on your ads, but we intend to charge for call metrics in the future.

Once you know where your calls are coming from, you can refine your marketing strategy to make sure you’re getting the most out of your ads. For example, you could test different ad text variations to see which results in the most calls or reallocate budget to campaigns that truly bring you the highest ROI.

Currently, call metrics is only available to a limited number of US advertisers. We plan to make the feature available to more advertisers in the coming months. To find out if call metrics is available in your account and to learn more about the feature, visit Google Ad Innovations.

Additionally, if you want to see call metrics in action, watch the video above.


Posted by Surojit Chatterjee, Senior Product Manager, AdWords