In the Adwords blog, Google announced today a new feature: Adwords call metrics.
Why is this important?
A core advantage of paid search marketing over traditional channels (such as the yellow pages) is the ability to track and measure the effectiveness of the campaign. If you know every dollar going into paid search returns six, you can make intelligent decisions on your budget and forecast accurately your future cash flow and income.
What does this mean for your business?
If your business is significantly driven by phone calls (such as law firms), Adwords call metrics will allow you to test a paid search campaign and automatically track and measure the success.
Will it cost money?
Google plans to eventually charge for this, but I’ll bet they keep it free if they see a sufficient increase in paid search ads.
But my receptionist already does this – she asks how new clients found us.
This might be true, but was the phone call from a paid or natural search result? Did they search for your brand name or for a specific solution? Was it a certain ad copy that convinced them to call? Google tracks things you don’t even think about, and you wouldn’t ask a new client.
How can this immediately help my business?
Once you are eligible for call metrics, you enter your phone number as the display number. Google will show this number to your prospects, but when they call it Google will reroute through their system. Then just sit and wait.
After you have a good data set (say, a month) look at your campaigns and identify which ones generated phone calls and for how long. Did some obscure specialty generate a lot of phone calls? There may be a revenue treasure chest waiting to find.
