Click-to-call ads were introduced seven years ago to help you connect with more customers over the phone. Since then, we’ve heard one thing loud and clear: you want to drive even more calls. And it’s no surprise—on average, calls convert three times better than web clicks.¹

To help you generate more calls, we’re rolling out new call bid adjustments, which allow you to control how often the call option appears with your search ads. Use call bid adjustments to increase bids on campaigns that drive valuable phone calls. For example, if you’re a travel advertiser, you may see higher order values from calls because it can be easier to cross-sell rental cars, group tours, and other vacation add-ons during a live conversation. Raise your call bid adjustments to show call extensions more frequently and drive more of these high-value call conversions.

“Calls are an important source of new customer leads for us. Call bid adjustments help us improve our click-to-call visibility and ensure we’re appearing in the top 1-2 positions on mobile. Our on-the-go customers convert quickly within a short window of time, so it’s critical to be front and center, and show them that we offer storage units at the right price and location. Since implementing call bid adjustments and bidding higher for calls, we’ve seen a 37% increase in call volume with a 22% decrease in average cost-per-call.”
– Stephanie Christensen, Paid Acquisition Analyst

“Our customers want to speak to a real person to make sure they’re choosing the right medical alert system for themselves or a loved one. When we can walk them through our offerings live and give them that peace of mind, they have a 30% likelihood of converting, which is nearly 2x higher than with web leads. Someone connecting with us from a call extension is more valuable than a website click, so call bid adjustments to allow us to optimize for that greater value. We’ve worked with our agency, Metric Theory, to increase bids specifically for calls and improve how often the call extension shows. As a result, we’ve generated 20% higher call volume while decreasing the cost by 60%.” 
– Matt Guerrieri, Director of Marketing

“Call bid adjustments have helped us meet a key marketing objective by delivering a strong uplift in performance year over year, with a 79% increase in click to call rate. It has also enabled us to target our audience to generate higher value insurance policies. The flexibility of the service allows us to make the call option more prominent, thereby driving a greater number of relevant calls. Calls deliver a significant proportion of our monthly leads and we are currently working to push call bid adjustments even harder.”

– Anthony Gamble, Head of Digital Marketing (Acquisition)

Call bid adjustments are available exclusively in the new AdWords experience, which will roll out to all advertisers by the end of the year.² To learn more about AdWords calls solutions, visit our Help Center. You can also check out best practices for maximizing call performance and improving the caller experience. 

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

Living in a mobile-first world has made it easier than ever to pick up the phone and talk to a business directly. That’s why we’ve continued investing in call innovations based on the great feedback we’ve heard from you. From call-only ads for marketers who prioritize calls to imported call conversions that allow you to upload your own call conversion data directly into AdWords, we’ve strived to drive more high-quality calls to your business in three main ways:

1. Simplified workflows so you can set up click-to-call ads faster
2. Better ad experiences that make it easier for people to call you
3. Detailed call reporting that shows which parts of your campaigns drive the most valuable calls 

We have new updates coming soon across these areas to help you improve your calls performance.

Get your call extensions up and running more quickly

Account-level call extensions will begin rolling out this week to help you set up call extensions at scale. You can implement them once across your entire account rather than adding them multiple times to individual campaigns and ad groups.
In the coming months, we’re also rolling out automated call extensions to more advertisers globally to help you set up call extensions more quickly. AdWords will identify landing pages that already feature a prominent phone number, and automatically set up a call extension and call reporting for this phone number to help you drive more calls to your business

New year, new look for click-to-call ads

In addition to making call extensions quicker to set up, we’re improving the ad experience to help consumers call you more easily. For example, we started testing business names in the headlines of call-only ads last year to help advertisers maximize high-quality calls from people who intend to call them.

“Introducing business names to call-only ads has improved the quality of calls we drive from Google Search for clients across our agency. We’ve been able to showcase their brands more clearly and increase user trust, which has led to significantly higher clickthrough and call conversion rates.”
–Kevin Quinlan, President of wommster.com

We’re now rolling this change out globally and will continue experimenting with other new features in click-to-call ads, including testing caller satisfaction ratings to show consumers which businesses are delivering a great user experience over the phone.

New reporting for keyword and ad-level call details

Measuring performance from your click-to-call ads is essential for making informed decisions about your spend and optimizations. AdWords call reporting is easy to set up and available in 23 countries around the world at no additional cost to show you useful insights and conversions from the calls you’re receiving. We’ll soon be adding new call details to your keyword and ad copy reports. Additional columns for “Phone impressions” and “Phone calls” will give you a more complete view of call performance and help you see where there are opportunities to improve. For example, consider using call-only ads on keywords with the highest phone-through rates, or decreasing wait times when you have customers on the phone to improve call conversion rates.
We hope these new updates to click-to-call setup, ad experiences and reporting will help you ring in 2017 with great calls performance. To learn more, visit the Help Center and read our best practices for driving phone calls to your business and optimizing the caller experience.

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog