AdWords Website Call Conversions – A Leap Forward in Lead Attribution

One of the most significant features to be rolled out for Google AdWords recently is website call conversions.

For many businesses, the purpose of their website or landing page is lead generation. While brands have had the ability to track form submissions back to their originating campaign or keyword for some time, this only showed part of the picture. If a business wanted attribution on phone calls, it would normally have to turn to a third party to provide a solution, but no longer. Google is now integrating this service into AdWords free of charge.

Now when someone performs a Google search using keywords that trigger your ad and then clicks through to your landing page, the new website call conversions feature will instantly change the phone number on your web page to a Google forwarding number that will ring through to your business. The same number will continue to appear on the web page for up to 90 days to correctly attribute return visitors or repeat callers back to the original keyword or ad that brought them there in the first place.

Calls can now be attributed back to the keyword and ad that generated the action. This can be invaluable information for optimizing campaigns by helping uncover those elements that are driving lead generation and conversion to businesses. Additionally, this feature can help provide a complete cost per lead, now inclusive of call and form submission leads, to help fine tune your CPC (cost per click) bids or better use the CPA (cost per acquisition) bidding strategy.

To enable this feature you will need to include some additional code on each page of your website and perform some setup in the AdWords interface. You will have the ability to customize some of the settings such as assigning a specific monetary value to each conversion or only counting calls over a designated amount of time.

Since this new feature will not be a solution to track calls from sources outside of Google AdWords, it will not be a direct threat to third party providers at this time. They still provide the only means of tracking display ads, direct & organic traffic, and calls from non-Google PPC providers all in one place.

If you are looking to illuminate lead attribution and further fine tune your CPC or CPA bids the website call conversion feature will be invaluable. Although there is some set up involved, it should be a small price to pay for what you are gaining in return.

– Matt Ganey, SEM Manager

The post AdWords Website Call Conversions – A Leap Forward in Lead Attribution appeared first on Search Optics Blog.