Forum Moderators: martinibuster
[webmasterworld.com...]
I mean if you are a plumber do you really want people to visit your website -- it is best to just call.
Uhh... that defeats the whole purpose of a pay per click advertising system.
I guess it's fine if google concludes that it mostly brings credibility to the ad and people end up clicking still (it makes sense, who would call a company based on 3 small lines of text somewhere on a web page). But if it's to evade completly paying for your ads, that's dishonest and should be ground for a ban.
I mean if you are a plumber do you really want people to visit your website -- it is best to just call.
What it did was INCREASE my click-thrus. What happens is that displaying a phone number ads credibility to your site - a lot of places don't want to talk to you on the phone anymore. When people see a phone number, it sends them the message that the company is worth looking at because you can get someone on the phone. So they always clicked, but they weren't any more likely to buy.
On ads where I said things like "call for best price" they would click AND call, which ultimately costs me twice as much. They would click to see what the website price was, then call to see how much better the phone price was.
So in conclusion, there weren't really any savings in the advertising budget by doing this. I didn't get any more web-only sales out of it this way, but I did get more phone calls and sales. No one ever called and didn't click, they either just clicked or clicked and called.
