When I read people say that Google’s call only ads are the best thing ever, I think to myself, here is someone that doesn’t track actual results. In theory, call only ads are a good idea and when Google first launched them, I was pretty excited about it. But there are 2 major holes in the ad product. #1: not every push on the call button turns into a phone call. In other words, people push the call button, the dial pad pops up, but people don’t always follow through by pushing the call button on their dial pad that causes their phone to start dialing the number. Statistically at Customwave, we’ve seen on average 1 out of 3 pushes on the call button not convert to an actual call. The bigger problem is #2. Which is that with call only ads, the client gets a bunch of wrong # calls. Most calls from call only ads happen because the ad is at the very top. Let’s say someone is looking for Joe’s Auto Repair. Under Google’s broad match (which most advertisers use), ABC Auto Repair would be advertised for the “joe’s auto repair” search. And we’ve found that lots of searchers don’t pay too close attention to the ads and just assume that Google is going to have Joe’s Auto Repair at the very top, not realizing that the ads will sometimes pop up at the very top. So someone calls the client ABC Auto Repair, but they think they’re calling Joe’s Auto Repair. We’ve seen that anywhere between 33%-50% of calls we’ve gotten from call only have been wrong # calls. Then add in the negatives such as these pushes on the call button being close to double the price of website clicks and the fact that you can’t use remarketing and you can quickly realize that call only, as of now, performs worse than traditional website clicks.
http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2016/11/17/lawyer-marketing-strategies-adwords
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