1. fiona kent

    marketing manager at ideal cruising

    02 October 2008 16:08pm

    Avatar-blank-50x50

    Hi,  I work for a small financial services company and our website is fairly basic, no buy online, uses email forms for enquiries & quote requests. My digital agency have suggested we promote our phone number on our google ad creative. Is this allowed?? I personally don't think its a great idea as it will discourage clicks so we will never get a true picture of customer search behaviour or ad creative performance (if we want to test variations), potentially will lower our quality score and rankings, not too mention causing diffulcties for monitoring offline enquiries generated i.e. which keywords/ads generate the most enquiries & sales.. I am surprised this has been suggested.. Any advice from other experts??? Thanks.

  2. Hannah Norrish

    PA at BLM Quantum

    13 October 2008 23:50pm

    Hannah Norrish

    Hey Fiona,

    Google trialled this a while ago and I think they are looking into revisiting 'Cost Per Call' again in the near future. However, you are right, adding a phone number into your creative will reduce the relevancy of your ad and therefore gain a low quality score.

    You need to be focusing the keywords around the content of your site, most people choose their keywords first but you need to reverse engineer this as it's often difficult for small businesses to modify their sites.

    By bidding on keywords that reflect your ad copy and also the landing paage of the site you will gain a much better chance of increasing your quality score and in turn relevance. Which of course will improve your CPC's and reduce your media costs.

    Without knowing any further details about your site I can't make any other recommendations, hope this helped.

    Regards

    Craig

  3. Chris Turberville-Tully

    Managing Director at Inspiration Inc

    14 October 2008 10:08am

    Chris Turberville-Tully

    Hi Fiona,

    Are they a Google Professional Company or do they have Google Adwords Individuals? Because, as you say it's rather a strange strategy and only one that works for very specific sectors and personas.

    I would say you are right to query it and stick to your thoughts about quality score, keywords/phrases and trigger words.

    All the best,

    Chris.

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