Manthan

Google’s click to call advertising seems to have gone live. At least for a hotels around New York. Searching for hotels, New York returns ad’s with phone icon next to them. Click on the icon, shows up a text-box using which users can get connected to the advertisers for free. But these ad’s are not allowing click through to the advertisers site, which is not good from the advertisers point of view. Clicking on the results just shows the text box, it doesn’t allow users to navigate to the advertisers website. This is bizarre, since I can’t make out which hotel this advertisement is for. It just says “W Court Hotel”, no more information (like location) is available unless you give your phone number for a call back. So click to call seems to have an either – or options. Advertisers can either bid for “click to call” or just click throughs. Not many of these calls are going to be converted into bookings, since there is not enough information driving the users for initiating call backs. Advertisers will end up paying higher advertising rates for lot of blind calls.

Updated: One look at AOL’s pay per call offering seems to show some clues as to why the ad’s don’t have a click through. Google might be trying to provide “landing pages” for such ad’s similar to AOL.

Searching for Mortgage repayment, New York in AOL returns some “pay per call” results. Click on these results takes users to a landing page, instead of advertisers website.

Perhaps the advertisers did not create the landing pages or Google is yet to integrate the landing pages with these advertisements.
There was some speculations a few months back about “Google Automat” and I had blogged about how it could be used by advertisers for creation of landing pages. Perhaps in the future, Google might integrate this with Click to Call

Update 2: One my readers, Dan informs me that “estara” has been doing this for Amazon, A9 search.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.