Mobile and Technology

Google has introduced a new conversion tracking metric for AdWords. All AdWords accounts will now have the ability to report calls placed from mobile pages.

Published: 10 Oct 2011

Google has introduced a new conversion tracking metric for AdWords. All AdWords accounts will now have the ability to report calls placed from mobile pages.

Google highlighted that two of the most common ways to get mobile customers to call businesses are either by listing a phone number on a click-to-call ad, or adding a phone number onto a website. The company acknowledged that it can be more challenging to track the calls made by consumers clicking on the phone number on a website.

Red Ventures, a customer acquisition company in Charlotte, NC, was a beta partner for this new conversion metric. In addition to their own proprietary in-house tracking platform, the company used this new metric to track the use of click-to-call numbers on their mobile websites for a variety of partners.

“You’ll now be able to attribute clicks on your phone number or ‘call’ button back to the AdWords campaign, ad group, ad or keyword that brought a customer in. As this is a new tracking metric, there won’t be new charges or changes to CPCs. We hope that this new metric will give advertisers and agencies new, richer information on the value and returns from their mobile advertising,” wrote Surojit Chatterjee, product manager, Mobile Ads, Google on a company’s blog.

It is being highlighted that now, every advertiser can get full insight into calls generated from their AdWords spend on mobile devices, directly inside the AdWords interface and at a very granular level.

John Sutton, VP of Online Marketing at Red Ventures, sees this as a new added benefit to AdWords advertisers who “don’t have the capability required to produce unique keyword or ad level phone numbers on their mobile websites.

This new metric enables all advertisers to leverage existing AdWords tools to now optimise for calls. According to Sutton, this “opens the doors to participation in AdWords features that rely on conversion metrics like Enhanced CPC and Target CPA bidding.”

One can start using this new metric by installing a snippet of code on their landing pages. Upon doing so, one can set ‘calls’ as a conversion metric to track on their landing page. Next, one can pair calls focused campaigns with tools like Conversion Optimizer, then bid by setting a target CPA for calls, and ultimately automate ad serving to optimise for calls, explained Chatterjee.