The announcement of “bid for calls”, a pay per call (PPCall) offering from Google, demonstrates that the search giant is now becoming wise to just how important phone calls are to businesses in the UK and worldwide. In association with Call Metrics, it is apparent that Google is trying hard to increase their presence in the online to offline conversion space.

With Google’s bid for calls, advertisers will bid for phone calls in addition to bidding for clicks. This will only affect Google searches on computers and tablets, as mobile devices handle phone numbers differently in a “click to call” method. Bidding for phone calls could lead to a new ranking factor for Google AdWords; “call-through rate” could be born out of this depending on the amount of bids and how many calls are received.

Despite this, Google’s Surojit Chatterjee has expressed that those advertisers who don’t participate in bid for calls won’t be disadvantaged when it comes to their PPC rankings. This is good news for companies seeking a more holistic overview of calls originating from online advertising, not just PPC.

AdInsight Clarity does just that. You can quickly identify your best performing online campaigns and the areas of spend that are less productive. In our Call Volume report, you might find that more of your calls come from Google Organic search instead of Google PPC; if you don’t track all of your online advertising, it would be hard to make this discovery.

Our Call Log is able to provide you with individual call records of every call, including campaign and traffic source information, what search they used and whether the call resulted in a lead or a sale. Our keyword report allows you to find out which keywords generate phone calls to your business; we report on every keyword including long tail and misspellings.

There is a lot of value in having a full call tracking solution such as AdInsight. With our own call tracking software, you can:

• Understand how your visitors interact with your website before, during and after picking up the phone
• Accurately determine which of your online visitors subsequently call you
• How your visitors found you in the first place and via which keywords.

Further information about AdInsight can be found at http://www.adinsight.com/.