Fun with Dynamic Call Extensions

Call extensions – where you add your phone number to you PPC ad – aren’t news. Neither is using a call forwarding number at the same time so you can see how well you’re PPC adds are driving calls. But adding that same forwarding to your web site – on the fly – is still pretty fresh.

What?

An example will help. Say you see a Google ad with a phone number in it. You choose to click the ad and arrive at a landing page. You’re impressed by the product you see there. Like any good landing page, the phone number is large and in charge. It appears multiple times. You pick up the phone to call it. What you don’t know is that the number you’re seeing isn’t really there. It’s magic. It was borrowed from the Google ad and magically placed on the page – instead of the real one – just for you. It makes no difference to you as a user – your call proceeds normally.

But it makes a world of difference to you as an advertiser. Because now you can measure all the phone calls you triggered with your ads. That’s value that was pretty hard to measure before.

Now Native in Adwords

You could achieve the same thing with various products before, but Adwords only rolled it out recently and now we’re trying it. The setup isn’t hard, but it is painstaking. And once you set it up, you may still have to wait until Adwords ‘grants’ you a forwarding number. But we think it’ll be worth it.

More news as it happens.