The phone numbers will be added as a fifth line in the ad, something like the mockup below.

Google has recognized that the primary use of the phone is for phone calls!

Although smartphones enable a lot of great online applications, many people still prefer to gather their purchase information verbally.

This is a smart move for Google, which will allow them to capture more Pay-per-click clicks when people may otherwise scroll down to the non-paid listings. Google has, incidentally, been experimenting with click-to-call since 2005 and seems to have decided that the simplest option is best for mobile.

Why are phone calls important? Mobile web browsing is still painful

Most websites don’t yet have a smartphone version and, even if they do, load times are still very slow. Phone load times can be up to 30 seconds for an average site. The consequence is that visitors are less likely to click an ad on the mobile phone; the time cost is just too high.

This is also a good reminder that many mobile visitors to your site are just looking for your phone number. Is it on your home page?

Phone calls may be important for your non-mobile visitors too

Several of our Conversion Rate Optimization clients have both online and phone call conversion objectives. We’ve had a lot of success testing landing page variations to maximize phone calls.

For example, we optimized the combined phone call and online lead generation conversion rate for B2B merchant account vendor Merchant Warehouse.

Also, we recently increased phone call conversions for the addiction recovery institution, Saint Jude Retreat House, by 42% with a single A/B/n test! On Jan 13, 2010, we will share all the details on how we did it.

Join the Upcoming Phone Call Conversion Optimization Webinar

If phone calls are important for your business, don’t miss the upcoming webinar, happening on Jan 13, 2010 where you’ll learn how you too can get results like Saint Jude Retreat House enjoys. Seats are filling up faster than most webinars, providing more evidence of the growing importance in phone call conversion optimization.

Click here to register for the webinar.

And “the new” is Landing Page Optimization for more PHONE CALL conversions.

We at WiderFunnel are certainly seeing an increase in the number of clients wanting to drive not only more online conversions on the site but more phone calls as well (sometimes the objective is to increase both; other times, it’s only about driving more phone calls to the call centre).

Landing Page Optimization for Phone Call Conversions

The new challenge, then, is how to optimize the conversion rate of phone calls by running conversion optimization experiments. Our first webinar of the year on January 13, “Boosting AdWords Landing Page Phone Call Conversions by 42%” will showcase just that.

In this upcoming webinar, we will show how visionary Saint Jude Retreat House, a private drug and alcohol addiction facility, used conversion optimization to lift customer telephone inquiries by 42% as a result of improving the persuasiveness of its paid search landing page.

You can register here (remember, maximum capacity is 150 – so better register now).

Another “new”: The pay-per-call business model

But marketers are not only increasing their demand for more phone call conversions on their own landing pages. A whole new business model is emerging: the pay-per-call business model (or PPCall).

Pay-per-call is like the cost-per-click (CPC), CPA and CPL marketing model but done with phone calls, not clicks.

According to Telmetrics, the pay-per-call models are poised to experience “explosive growth” in 2010.

Now, while Telmetrics has an incentive to forecast this trend (they provide “innovative call measurement solutions to help advertisers maximize the effectiveness of their marketing programs” as well as “track and analyze consumer response to any direct response broadcast, online or print campaign that features a call-to-action response phone number”), marketers committed to improving the ROI of their marketing investments need to pay attention, especially if they drive local business.

PPCall online ads encourage the user to establish phone contact rather than sending them to a web site – and this is where the real potential lies. And big players are entering the industry.

According to Marketing Vox, vendors are rolling out pay per call ad products. AT&T Interactive has updated its YELLOWPAGES.COM iPhone app called YPmobile (the latest version has new features including Video Profiles and Pay Per Call Ads). Following a pilot program, ShareASale.com opened its ShareASale Pay-Per-Call Center to its network of 2,500 merchants last month. RingRevenue provided the platform for the ShareASale Center. It has also partnered with LinkTrust to offer similar services to merchants and other networks.

So, stay tuned for more growth in the accountable advertising space in 2010 – and you can start by registering for WiderFunnel’s first webinar of the year on January 13, “Boosting AdWords Landing Page Phone Call Conversions by 42%”

Last week WiderFunnel Marketing again had the pleasure of attending the Google Analytics and Website Optimizer Partner Summit at Google’s headquarters in Mountainview, CA.

At the summit Authorized Consultants got a sneak peak at the newest features to be bundled into Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer starting today.

Here is a look at some of our favorite new Google Analytics features.

Mobile reporting

According to the Nielsen Company the total number of smartphone (iphone, Android, Blackberry) subscribers grew from 15 million in Q2 2008 to 26 million in Q2 2009. That’s a 73% increase in just one year!

In response to this fast-growing trend Google has expanded its Mobile Reporting feature by tracking applications built for iPhone and Android devices.

Now using GA you can gain an understanding of how users engage with their mobile apps, such as what actions are taken within an app and what features are used.

The Nielsen Company also reports a 34 percent year-over-year increase in mobile Web visitors from 42.5 million in July 2008 to 56.9 million in July 2009. In particular women, teens and seniors are helping to make this growth happen.

Nielsen Company’s mobile media guru Chris Quick comments, “Now that the technology is more mainstream, women are quickly embracing the benefits as ‘connected consumers,’ tapping the convenience of Web access on mobile phones to network, browse the latest shopping deals and get ideas for dinner, all while on the go.”

If you are currently running a mobile web site, GA can help you track traffic to from all web-enabled devices whether or not the device runs JavaScript.

In the coming weeks, site owners building on PHP, Perl, JSP or ASPX will be able to add a server side code snippet to their mobile websites to enable this tracking.

Availability: Mobile Apps tracking available week of October 21, 2009. Users can download mobile tracking snippet instructions from the Google Analytics blog or wit for the code snippet to be published via the Setup UI over the coming weeks

Expanded Goal Tracking

The Expanded Goal Tracking feature is an obvious favorite of ours. Gone are the days of creating multiple profiles in your GA account if you have more than 5 goals.  Google now allows you to define up to 20 goals per profile.

Google has also introduced a new goal type measuring site engagement and branding success on your site.

Web traffic and conversion rates alone do not tell the full story. Measuring engagement and branding success is key in understanding the lifetime value of a customer.

The new goal types allow you to set thresholds for Time on Site and Pages per Visit.

Availability: Available to all users the week of October 21, 2009.

Multiple Custom Variables

Initially Google offered us a single User Defined Variable in Google Analytics.

If you wanted to know if your visitors were male or female, you could collect this information in the single GA User Defined Variable and then segment web site activity to learn if Males purchased more than Females, or if Female shoppers purchase different items from Male shoppers and so on.

Or, if you wanted to know whether visitors to your site who purchased something returned to the site to shop again, you could set the User Defined Variable to a value such as “customer” on the receipt page and then segment your GA reports to learn about repeat customer activity.

But what if you wanted to know how Female Repeat Customers used your site? A likely question if you are examining customer loyalty, and the lifetime value of a customer.

Up to now tracking multiple values in a single User Defined Variable in GA has been difficult to implement and has produced complex reports. The problem is that you don’t always collect the same information at the same time.  If you capture a visitor’s gender at one point in their session and then capture the “customer” value indicating that they made a purchase, the second value would overwrite the first value that you set.

With the release of GA’s latest features, you can now set multiple custom variables.

With this feature, users can classify any number of interactions on the site into  trackable segments. Multiple custom user segments can now be collected at the page, session, and visitor-level concurrently. For example you can now define and track visitors according to visitor attributes (e.g. member vs. non-member), session attributes (e.g. logged-in or not), and by page-level attributes (e.g. viewed Sports
section).

Availability: Phased rollout through the coming weeks starting the week of October 21, 2009.

Managing your custom reports and advanced segments

Being able to share segment definitions, custom reports and report templates is a huge time saver when it comes to distributing GA reports throughout the company.

With the latest changes in GA you can:

• Create a custom report or custom segment for a particular profile and make it available to any user who has access to the profile.

• Share the URL link for a custom report to anyone who has an Analytics account and a pre-formatted template will automatically be imported into their account.Once the other person receives the link and clicks it, a template of your custom report or advanced segment will load in his or her own account. Your profile’s data will not be included in the template.

Availability: This feature is currently available to all GA users for more information see the Google Analytics Help article.

For a complete list of the new features released this week see GA Blog