Using Google's Phone Extensions to Boost Your Mobile Search Conversion Rate
You see them everywhere: in line at the grocery store, waiting for a doctor’s appointment, and between commercial breaks on TV. You see them during lunch, before movies, and even during conversations! The use of mobile devices and smartphones is on the rise. They are used to entertain, find a quick piece of information, or find an urgent solution to a problem. The first step to these three uses is an internet search.
Last year, Google saw a 400% increase in the number of mobile search queries. In fact, 15% of all search queries in Google were from mobile devices. Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, declared 2011 to be “the year of mobile.” As smartphone purchases climb, we expect these trends to continue. With mobile search on the verge of reaching critical mass, you should ask yourself these questions: are your online marketing efforts doing enough to take advantage of this growing source of traffic and revenue? Is your website formatted to be easily usable by customers on mobile devices?
It can get tedious for users to navigate the web on mobile devices, even with the advanced browsers on smartphones. Most websites are not optimized for the small screen size of mobile devices. This is unfortunate for sites that want to attract mobile searchers, but do not have a mobile optimized site or landing page. Luckily, you don’t have to send people to your landing page. Google has recently begun offering “Phone Extensions,” which shows a clickable phone number next to your ads. Now mobile users can call your sales team or call center directly rather than filling out a lead form online. Let’s detail how this feature works.
Calls Tracked to a PPC Only Number:
The most powerful aspect of “Phone Extensions” is that it uses a PPC only number, thus enabling you to link calls generated from your paid search campaigns, as well as conversions and revenue resulting from those calls, directly into your Adwords campaigns. This gives you a more accurate picture of your ROAS and allows you to optimize your campaigns for potentially valuable phone orders.
Companies often experience difficulty tracking online-generated calls. Some resort to the less effective method of asking people when they call in where they found the number. This can lead to problems, because when a potential customer calls in they might not be clear that they found the number online. Also, if the same number is located on multiple websites (e.g. an affiliate, a business listing, the main site or a PPC-specific page) the user may be unable to identify the referring site. Furthermore, sales representatives may neglect to ask for a phone prospect’s referral source, even when explicitly directed to do so.
A PPC-only phone number eliminates these potential inaccuracies. Its greatest benefit is that it makes PPC generated calls easy to keep separated from other sources. This allows you to easily determine how many calls and conversions are coming in from PPC. Additionally, this number can be shown in your ads, on your PPC landing pages, and on the other pages in your online conversion funnel. Having this phone number readily available on your website will help convert a higher number of users who might otherwise leave your site due to feeling confused, frustrated, or uncomfortable filling in a form online.
Once you have a call tracking solution in place, you can enable a clickable phone number, which we will detail in the next section.
Click to Call:
A second valuable feature of Phone Extensions is the “Click-to-Call” extension. Adwords displays a clickable version of your phone number directly within your ad, which mobile phone users can easily select to be connected directly to your sales team, without having to navigate to a new page or scroll through pages of your site. Though the standard cost per click applies, there is no extra charge for employing this feature, and Google gives you the flexibility to determine which phone number is displayed. It has the added bonus of increasing the number of pixels your ad takes up on a page and increasing the ads’ click through rate.
Google has also recently begun offering “Call Metrics”, a more advanced version of Click-to-Call for your ads. It is currently in the beta stage and is limited to a few advertisers. When you enable this feature, Google generates a unique Google Voice number for each campaign for which Call Metrics is enabled. This number appears as a clickable phone number next to your ads. The call is routed through Google to your business number. This allows Google to give you individual statistics for each call and call metrics for the total number of calls, number of answered calls, number of missed calls, the average call duration, and sum of the duration of all calls.
(Picture Source: http://adwords.blogspot.com/2010/01/introducing-click-to-call-phone-numbers.html)
Conclusion
Once you have calls being generated by PPC, it is critical that your sales team or call center is prepared and trained to receive these calls. You will likely experience an increase in call volume from a variety of sources: users calling from the ad itself, from the PPC landing page, and from other pages in the conversion funnel. Your sales staff should be prepared to deal with the diversity of calls that they will be receiving. Users that call directly from your click to call ad will have very little context about your business and what you do. Your sales team will have to be prepared to fill in the gaps for them and to sell them on them value of your business, while also screening out a higher volume of unqualified customers. Simultaneously, they will have to deal with customers calling from further down the sales funnel ( e.g. customers who are not comfortable providing their personal information through a web form, customers who are confused by the site and require phone assistance, and customers who simply prefer talking to a live representative). Your sales team should be fully briefed on the types of calls that they will be receiving and should be prepared to deal with these common scenarios.
As the mobile market continues to expand and mobile traffic grows, Google’s phone extensions are a simple way to take advantage of an expanding opportunity. 360Partners has already implemented these options for some of our clients and have seen great results. Contact us at SearchMarketing@360Partners.com if you are interested in implementing call extensions for your PPC campaigns or have any other questions.
About the author: Joshua Niederriter is an SEM Analyst for 360 Partners. His clients include a variety of lead gen and ecommerce businesses. He received dual degrees in Mathematics and Economics from the University of Florida.
