For a while now, Google has allowed select mobile advertisers to add their phone number to AdWord text ads so that customers can just click on the number and place a call. Until now, though, it was hard to track how well these ads really performed, as Google didn’t give advertisers a convenient way to track these calls. To remedy this, Google is launching AdWords Call Metrics today with a limited set of U.S.-based advertisers. The company plans to open this beta up to more advertisers in the coming months.
Call Metrics uses the technology behind Google Voice to assign unique phone numbers (both toll free and local) to every campaign and then tracks the number of calls generated by each campaign (total, received and missed calls) and the average and total call duration. In the near future, Call Metrics will also allow advertisers to track the callers’ area codes. For the time being, this feature will be available for free (besides the regular cost of pay-per-click ads on AdWords), though Google plans to charge for it “in the future.”
As Search Engine Land’s Greg Sterling notes, Call Metric is available for both PC and mobile campaigns, though while mobile marketers have the option to buy calls exclusively, those who want to target PC users don’t have this option yet.
