Barely 3 months ago I wrote about Adwords Call Forwarding becoming available in Australia.

As useful as this was, there are several niches where users aren’t going to click the phone number in the ad before they’ve visited the website.

Now, Google have closed this loop and launched Website Call Conversions – live and available in Australia today.

What’s the big deal?

The breakthrough here is that Adwords advertisers can now trace Phone Call conversions right back to the Campaign, Ad Group and Keyword where it came from – *after* someone has clicked the ad and spent time on your website.

Prior to this announcement, the only way this information could be obtained was by either:

1. Manually tracking phone calls and asking Customers how they heard of you (which customer knows they clicked on an Adwords ad compared to an organic link?), or
2. Integrating complicated and expensive 3rd party phone number analytics

With Google introducing this as a native feature, this continues the trend of the big players effectively shutting out entire cottage industries from feeding off their platform. Facebook did this at the start of the year when they bypassed Premium FBX partners and made remarketing native for all Facebook advertisers.

Next Steps

For this to work:

• You must have Call Extensions activated
• You must install a new code snippet on your website that displays a dynamically generated Google Call Forwarding number
• The number can be styled to match your website
• When this number is dialled (either manually or clicked on via a mobile), a conversion is triggered

Perhaps the only con to note is that this (dynamically generated Google Call Forwarding number) is now the phone number that an end customer will have associated with your business on their phone. Should they call you back on this number, this will trigger a second ‘Many-per-click’ Conversion in your Adwords account.

The interesting part from here will be how different will your campaigns look now that this major source of data is factored into your account performance?

No doubt many will find that campaigns that they were writing off as underperforming, may now be shown to justify their existence. Likewise, campaigns that have been performing, may even be shown to be far exceeding past performance.

Whatever the case, these are incredible times we are marketing in!