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Recently, Google Adwords has extended their extensions tab to include Phone extensions and Product Extensions.  This bring the list to ..

• Location Extensions – Link your Google Places account of your business and show your address under Ad text
• Sitelink Extensions – Create sitelinks for certain pages of you site that appear below your ad text
• Product Extensions – Allows you to link your E-commerce products from Google Merchant Center to your Ads
• Phone Extensions – Allows you at attach a phone number to your ad copy

Today I would like to discuss Phone Extensions, but I will touch on the others at a later date.  First of all I would like to note that Phone Extensions does not replace website phone tracking for your website as it is more of an additional feature for phone tracking that can be used alone (limited) or with your current call tracking system.  Also, Extensions usually only benefit ads that rank in the top 3 spots above the organic results.  For example, the address line for Location Extensions should appear no matter what your rank is and will show your closest location to the searchers location. However, the Google Map expansion add-on will only appear if you are in the top 3 spots.  You can not expect your Extensions to appear with every search as Google has a number of benchmarks that determine whether or not your extensions are relevant to the user and either will or will not show for a particular search.

What does Phone Extensions do?

It lets you add a phone number to your Ad Copy that can be tracked and will show you the number of phone calls your campaign received.

As you can see in the above example (rank 1), the advertiser has put their phone number in the Ad copy (#646) and the Phone Extension phone number (#877) has also appeared to the right of the headline.  A good example to show you where the number appears in the ad space.  Now this advertiser probably doesn’t need to waste ad text space with his phone number.  However, he is a locksmith so the more places he has their number viewable, the better!

How do I setup Phone Extensions?

Navigate to the Ad Extensions Tab, you may need to click on the arrow button to the right of networds if it isn’t showing up for you.  Click on the “View:” drop down navigation menu and click on Phone Extensions. Fill in the details as shown below and choose whether or not your want the Call-Only Format (good for mobile only targeted campaigns) and Call Metrics.  Depending on where you live, you may be able to get a local area code tracking number.  If not, you will have to get a toll-free number.  Once you have completed filling in your information – click save.

Now, you should see the same as the below example (minus the stats).

Uses and Limitations of Phone Extensions?

Obviously, you can use Phone extensions as a gauge on how successful certain campaigns are and how engaging your ad copy and call to action is.  You can see the number of calls recieved, missed, total call durations and average call duration for each campaign that has phone extensions implemented on.   This is some really good campaign level information but…

there are limitations of Phone Extensions in its current state.  You can not drill down to the ad group, or keyword or even the ad copy that helped you generate those phone calls.  You are in the dark about which ad copy encouraged the searcher to call your business before even clicking on the ad.  That is a huge gap in this system and would be a very powerful addition for optimizing ad copy, not to mention keywords and ad groups as well!  Maybe by dynamically changing the phone number for each impression would make that possible but maybe that it too much bandwidth requirement on Google’s end. Also, the calls do not count as conversions, this as an option may be a later addition as well.  Remember to check your columns tab to make sure you have the right columns showing for your Phone Extension call tracking.

I believe these additions and more will come with future updates of the Google Adwords interface.  Also like Location Extensions, phone and the other extensions may become available in the Adwords Editor aswell.

Need help with Google Adwords Extensions?

Give me a call — (646) 351-0659 or email me at hugh@iuvoonline.com

Hugh Prysten: Consultant & SEM Strategist at Iuvo Online Media Consultants