Stephen Espinosa

Two days ago Google announced that they are launching a new type of ad unit that allows advertisers to add Click-To-Call functionality in their Mobile Ad Units. This opens all kinds of doors for advertisers to take advantage of mobile–specifically, the types of queries that inherently lead to offline transactions quickly (i.e. gas stations, movies, etc.)

Due to the fact that these ad types are limited to just mobile, you can imagine nearly all the advertisers interested in this offering would be local advertisers in one way or another. The most intriguing thing about this announcement, however, is how Google is actually using the click-to-call action in these ads.

Here is an example for the search “Hotels in Corona CA”

You can see that obviously Best Western is taking advantage of the newly announce Click-To-Call ads, but you also notice that on the ad there are three different blue links. Why is this significant? Well, these three different calls-to-action all lead the user to different paths to contact the hotel. This is very smart on Google’s part: they are basically saying that whatever the user clicks on must be what they are interested in; therefore, we should alter the user experience accordingly. So let’s take a look at what happens when a user clicks on each one of those links.

The most intriguing one of the three links is obviously the phone number. You would assume for click to call that they would use call tracking phone numbers right? Wrong.  That phone number shown above is the actual phone number of hotel. Here is what happens when you click that link below:

You are taken to a landing page designed specifically for the iPhone (the smart phone used in this case) and Javascript simply pops up the call function, prompting the user to “Cancel” or “Call”.  If the user selects “Cancel,” they then only have the option to view the listing in Google Maps or hit the call icon and call the business. Clicking on the address part in the ad simply opens up your Google Maps application and shows the listing information, while selecting Ad title, in this case the business name, takes you to the landing page designated by the advertiser.

One of the first things that popped into my head after I thought through this was that the iPhone picks out phone numbers on the page and makes them clickable automatically. Well, Google got around that by doing some clever CSS coding, I believe.  Check out this screenshot of another ad for the same search:

They coded it so that the iPhone can’t scan that ad text and make phone numbers clickable. As you can see, there is an 866 number in the Hotels.com ad, yet you can’t click on the ad.  Nor can you copy the phone number inside the ad, by holding your finger down and pressing the copy button as you see below:

It only allows you to copy the whole <div>;the only text copied is “Hotels in Corona” and “Sponsored Links,” so there is no way to copy a phone number to paste into a dialer and/or email without Google getting paid for a click. Clever.

This is one of the simplest, yet most clever innovations I have seen in Local Ads by Google.  They eliminate extra costs and confusion on the SMB’s end caused by using tracking numbers. They also do not have to go through the  process of adding call metrics to analytics up-front; instead, they can release that part at a later point while getting this new ad unit off the ground. You get all this added functionality, without adding many more steps in the ad creation process. Cheers to Google!

P.S. I will be blogging a lot more in 2010 I promise