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Case Study: Google Adwords Call Extensions Effect On Local Lead Generation

Whatup my peeps?

Ad Hustler is back with a pretty interesting case study.

The Backstory

I have a local client (local traffic but located halfway across the country from where I am) who I’m running a campaign for.  The client is a national chain but locally franchise owned.  For this reason, we were unable to create a landing page and track all of the leads that the client was getting because corporate requires that the franchise owner uses the main corporate domain for all advertising purposes.  This ruled out traditional lead gen type pricing so they opted to hire me on a retainer.  Although I could easily just collect their money from now until eternity, I like to be able to offer true results.  I pride myself on it.  Local businesses are usually very focused on phone calls so this presented a bit of a problem since I had no way of editing the corporate site to replace the phone number with a tracking number of my own.  I decided to use Google Adwords Call Extensions, just to see if by adding the phone number using a call extension gave me any trackable results whatsoever.

The Case Study

This case study doesn’t focus on the entire campaign that I am running for the client.  What it focuses on is how the call extensions performed as a trackable metric for an otherwise untrackable campaign.  Although the call extension is able to run with every ad in my account, Google picks and chooses when it actually shows the call extension to a searcher.  Below you will find 2 weeks worth of stats for only ads that displayed WITH the call extension and my results.

Impressions: 4,970
Clicks: 294
Click Through Rate: 5.92%
Avg CPC: $0.46
Cost: $135.24
Trackable Phone Calls: 60

REMEMBER: THIS is only phone calls that occur BEFORE the click, not once they land on the website which is bound to be plentiful as well.

Something interesting to note here is that Google is supposed to track how many calls your receive if someone click-to-calls and track those within your account.  They track me as zero click-to-calls, hence each phone call I recieved actually converted off of a FREE impression, rather than a PAID click.

Another thing to note is that these phone calls are CHEAP.  The average call is costing only $2.25.  If you were selling these on a per-lead basis they could be quite profitable.

Conclusion

If you are running a local lead gen campaign DO NOT FORGET AD EXTENSIONS.  Let me repeat: DO NOT FORGET AD EXTENSIONS!  Not only can you get results like this off of very little spend but they make your ad stand out from the rest, driving up click through rate and driving down cost per click.  If you are using a landing page and tracking all the calls to charge on a per lead basis, you can add these ad extension phone calls onto your reports and create better results for the client and more monies in your pocket.

Anyone else have experience with ad extensions?  Please Share!

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Published inCase StudiesLocal Online Advertising

6 Comments

  1. Andrew Andrew

    Ad Hustler, never actually thought about using ad extensions intill I read your post.

  2. aghper aghper

    i am thinking to add phone and email capture form,the phone like kall8 charges by the minutes and easily i can track phone calls

  3. That’s actually a great tip. So how well did the leads from those phone calls convert? It would seem like a phone call would have a much higher conversion rate than just a click through.

  4. Those are great numbers, I was wondering what the population size is of his target area? Was this in a fairly large city? Also would this market be considered competitive? Thanks.

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