Online advertising is extremely competitive and you need to stand out in a way if you want your target audience to click on your ads and convert. Good as copy, an irresistible offer, and a relevant landing page are all standard procedure when it comes to good Google ads. Fortunately, the search engine giant also offers plenty of extensions that can help you increase your click-through rate. Including your phone number in your ads is one of them.
When you create a Google Ad, you have the option of including your phone number in your call to action to encourage customers to get in touch with you. Some ads can be built around this CTA, so adding your number in the ad is the key. But it’s not as simple as just copy-pasting your number in the ad copy.
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What Are Google’s Call Extensions?
Google helps you display your phone number in a Google Ad through its call extensions. This is the best way to include this information in the ad, as simply writing it in the ad copy might actually get your ad to be disapproved. In addition to that, call extensions provide a better user experience, as Google creates a call button for ads with the added number.
Google’s call extensions also allow you to view calls clearly in your reports, as call conversions. Tracking your call log is highly relevant for campaigns centered around this metric, and Google has been working hard on offering a full range of services for businesses getting phone calls, including call recording and complex reporting tools.
With the help of the call extensions, you can create call-only campaigns, or offer the calls as a choice besides getting on a landing page after clicking on the ad. A direct call will be equivalent to a click on the title of the ad. After setting your call extensions, you can track the phone calls that came through your ads by importing outside data, or by enabling call reporting in Google Ads.
Google Call Reporting
A very useful feature of the free Google suite of reporting tools – in this case, your Google Ads reports – is that it lets you track offline conversions, like phone calls or store visits.
Tracking phone calls with Google’s call reporting gives you data like:
- Call duration
- Call type
- Phone-through rate
- Conversions
You can use the Google forwarding numbers to monitor the calls you are getting. You can monitor a local number that shares the same area code with your business or toll-free phone numbers. They are tracking numbers used for detailed call reporting, but if you don’t want them displayed in your ads you should use the call extensions without call reporting.
How to Remove a Number from a Google Ad?
The advantages of setting call extensions in your Google Ads are clear, but what happens when Google displays a phone number you don’t want to be included in your ad? Or when you get too many unwanted calls from a vaguely targeted ad? Or when you just decide to not use a certain phone number in your ads anymore?
You can remove a number from a Google Ad from the Google Adwords call extensions tab. In the call reporting table, you can see all the call extensions used in your ad groups and campaigns, so you can identify which ones are linked to the number you want to remove.
You can remove a certain call extension by disabling call extensions for ad groups linked to it, or by managing the call extensions of the entire campaign showing that number.
Is It Really Needed?
In our experience, unwanted results in your Google Ads reports don’t always have a clear cause. If you want to remove your number from a Google Ad because it doesn’t get enough conversions or you’ve been receiving unwanted calls, let us take a look.
The specialists at Australian Internet Advertising can spot the problem and get you the results you were targeting in the first place. Let us look into your call ads results, and we can suggest the best course of action for your campaigns.
