I started getting email announcement messages on Friday about changes to the way that phone numbers in AdWords advert copy will be treated. The first part of the email is shown below:

Start of email from Google

Google is converting all phone numbers in advert copy into phone numbers under the Call Extension. This means that you’ll be able to track whether calls are coming straight from the advert or from website interaction. There’s no current sign of this announcement on the official Google Inside AdWords blog, yet.

Explicitly offering a phone number to call has been an AdWords feature for mobile devices for nearly two years – but it is still quite rare to see, especially in smaller advertisers’ accounts. This change may come as a significant surprise to some advertisers – and is likely to draw their attention to the ever-increasing search volumes from mobile devices (both phones and tablets).

Will you be paying more?

If you have a lot of users who use a phone number embedded in your adverts, then you may see cost changes. It was previously free for a user to key in your phone number and call you. However, users can still choose to do that – it’ll be up to them, though.

When this change takes effect, it will cost you if users decide to click on your phone number to make a call. Unless you have also opted in to use Call Bidding, you’ll be looking at the cost per click for the advert – the announcements we’ve seen suggest that the price will be same as a standard click to your website.

This change probably does mean some more revenue for Google, especially on mobile devices. Previously, if you had a phone number in adverts, it may not have been clickable and the user would have had to record the number elsewhere and then call. This change should make it easier for users to call you – and at only the cost of a click. On the whole we suspect that the improved ease of use will compensate for the additional costs of the click – you may receive more phone calls as a result of this change.

Further Implications?

This move also makes it more likely that advertisers will offer a Google Forwarding Call Extension, and this will probably push some advertisers who have not intentionally used the Call Extension to consider which other extensions they should be using.

And of course, if phone calls are valuable to your business, then participating in the AdWords Bidding for Calls auction becomes attractive. This is a pretty new auction in AdWords and currently has relatively few bidding in it – keeping the value down. We’re pretty sure that while this announcement may do some positive things for advertisers, we expect the main impact to be increasing value of the Bid-per-call auction for Google – in some markets, the value of a call is far higher than the value of a click to a website, and increasing from the normal click cost will be highly desirable, if it brings in more calls.

There is a variation of the Call Extension that could see further increases in costs for advertisers – Google offers a Call Extension Forwarding Phone Number, allowing for better tracking of call details. The announcement does not say that the changes will involve Google Forwarding numbers – so advertisers should not be looking at the $1.00 (or£1.00 minimum in the UK) call costs, or higher. But it will draw these capabilities to more advertisers attentions.