Nickels, Dimes and Now Calls to your Business: $$$$$ For Google

If you haven’t noticed Google has been rolling out the product features like madmen lately. Believe you me this mad dash to…..well who knows where, is not just to help Mr. Advertiser better understand his advertising dollars. Oh no, Google wants MONEY. Not just any Money they – want your money.

One of these new ‘cool’ services is Google Call metrics. Right now this is a nifty free tool that allows advertisers to monitor exactly how many customers call directly from an ad rather than click and explore the website. Google ad innovations explains the tool as:

AdWords call metrics is a new feature that lets you measure the number of phone calls generated by your AdWords campaigns. Using the technology behind Google Voice, call metrics creates a unique phone number for each of your campaigns which is automatically inserted into your ad when it appears on Google.com, on both desktop computers & high-end mobile devices.

When a potential customer calls the number in your ad, AdWords notes that the call took place. Then, when you view your AdWords reports, you’ll see the number of calls you received and other metrics, including call duration.

I believe the truth is Google was just tired of seeing all of that wasted revenue from smart advertisers putting their phone numbers in adcopy. After all, no click no cash! At least that used to be the case.  Moving forward Google will charge for this service just as if a searcher clicked on an ad. I don’t need to speculate on this Google says it very blatantly.” You’ll still only pay for clicks on your ads, but we intend to charge for call metrics in the future.” Don’t be surprised if the future is sooner than you think.