Say Hello to Calls as Conversions in AdWords

Recent research shows that 70% of mobile searchers have called a business directly from search results and that over 40 million calls from Google ads are made each month to advertisers around the world. It’s clear that calls are important to businesses -- and we want to help you measure them in AdWords.

We announced on October 1st that phone calls would soon be added as an important conversion type as part of AdWords. Starting today, phone calls from mobile click-to-call ads will be added to the regular Conversion columns, which enable them to be used with automated bidding solutions like Conversion Optimizer. These mobile call conversions are available in countries where Google forwarding numbers are available.¹  In addition, calls made by customers from your mobile and desktop ads will be counted in your “Estimated Total Conversions,” a new column you can use to measure the full value you're getting from AdWords.

Calls as conversions are counted based on the aggregate number of calls generated by your ads and the duration of the phone calls. This is the same type of reporting that we have been providing on calls for several years.

Success with calls as conversions in AdWords

Businesses using AdWords have found that adding  phone numbers to their ads is an important way to connect with customers and drive incremental sales. Learn more.

Room & Board, a home furnishings retailer, uses call extensions and call conversions to track interest in their brand:

”Since we have implemented call extensions, we have seen nearly 30% of our total conversions come from phone calls. We want our customers to connect with us in the way they prefer. Call extensions and call conversions give us that ability and allow us to measure results at the same time."

Improve your performance with automated bidding

Previously, calls were counted in their own column called “Phone Call Conversions.” Now, call conversions from mobile ads are counted in the regular Conversion columns, so you can use free automated bidding tools like Target CPA to improve performance and save time.

Understand the full value of your advertising

Online ads can help drive conversions beyond a purchase made directly on your website. Adding calls to the Estimated Total Conversions column gives you a more holistic view of how your keywords drive those conversions, so you can set bids and budgets that more fully reflect the value you're getting from AdWords.

For a more in-depth product walkthrough of Estimated Total Conversions, calls as conversions, and a review of best practices, join us for a webinar tomorrow, November 13th at 10am PT. You can sign up here.

Posted by Anurag Agrawal, Product Manager, Calls

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¹ US, UK, Germany, France. Previously, these mobile conversions were in the “Phone Call Conversions” column

Improving Ad Rank to show more relevant ad extensions and formats

When people use Google to research and buy things, they're interested in the most relevant and useful results. Ad extensions help by providing more information to potential customers and additional ways for them to respond. For example, they can call your business number, see your business location on a map, or choose an even more relevant landing page that you're promoting with sitelinks. Ad extensions typically improve clickthrough rate and overall campaign performance because they make ads more useful.

Today, we're announcing improvements in the AdWords auction that let us more consistently show more relevant ad extensions and formats.

Ad Rank improvements

Our system for ordering ads on search results pages uses a calculation called Ad Rank. Previously, Ad Rank was calculated using your max CPC bid and your Quality Score. With this update, Ad Rank will also take into account a third component: the expected impact from your ad extensions and formats. In addition, we've increased the importance of Ad Rank in determining whether your ad is eligible to be displayed with extensions and formats.

Here are some more details and implications of these changes:

• Ad extensions and formats can now influence the position of your ad on the search results page. If two competing ads have the same bid and quality, then the ad with the more positive expected impact from extensions will generally appear in a higher position than the other.
• When estimating the expected impact of extensions and ad formats, we consider such factors as the relevance, clickthrough rates, and the prominence of the extensions or formats on the search results page.
• Because Ad Rank is now more important in determining whether your ad is shown with extensions and formats, you might need to increase your Quality Score, bid, or both for extensions and formats to appear. 
• In each auction, we'll generally show your highest performing and most useful combination of extensions and formats among those eligible. So there's no need to try to guess which extensions will help improve your clickthrough rate the most. 
• You may see lower or higher average CPCs in your account. You may see lower CPCs if your extensions and formats are highly relevant, and we expect a large positive performance impact relative to other competitors in the auction. In other cases, you may see higher CPCs because of an improvement in ad position or increased competition from other ads with a high expected impact from formats.
• For now, this update only affects search ads appearing on Google Search.

We've updated our Help Center articles on topics including ad extensions and how we rank ads to reflect these important changes.

Recommendations for using extensions

Extensions make your ads more useful and can improve your campaign performance. So you should add extensions that make sense for your business type and campaign goals. With these improvements to AdRank, our systems will do even more to automatically serve extensions in the contexts when they're most beneficial.

For example, consider someone downtown searching on a mobile phone for "auto repair." In this example, the user might be most likely to respond to your ad when they can click to call a phone number or tap a link to get directions to visit in person. So we may show a combination of call and location extensions with your mobile search ad.

Now imagine if someone were searching for "auto repair" on a laptop computer in the suburbs. Say your ad earned the 3rd ad position above the organic results in this auction. We might show your seller rating and sitelinks because that's the highest performing and most useful combination of extensions that could be shown with your ad in this particular auction and ad position.

We're always looking for ways to make ads more relevant to a user's intent and context. After months of testing, we're confident that these AdRank changes help achieve that goal by more consistently showing people the most useful combination of extensions and formats.

Posted by Chris Roat, Staff Software Engineer