Google Call-Only Ads or Call Extensions... Which is better? [See 12 months of results]

For service based businesses, one of the best features that you can use in Google Ads is to create ads that generate phone calls directly to your business. Meaning that users can complete a Google search and then click on your ad which goes directly to a phone call rather than taking them through to your website. And this function can be achieved in two core ways. Firstly, by creating a call campaign which creates call ads, which then places your business's phone number dashboard directly in the headline of that ad. Or secondly, you can add in call extensions, which add in a highlighted section which highlights your phone number on your existing responsive search ads. And in this video, I'm going to take you through the difference between call ads and call extensions. I'm then also going to take you through 12 months of a real life campaign so that you can see the difference in what these type of ads produce for, for a real business. And then finally, I'm gonna take you through the step by step process in how to set up a core campaign for your own business. But before we get into all of that great information, just in case we haven't met yet, my name is Aaron Young and I'm your 15,000 hour Google Ads master. And I've been creating profitable Google Ads campaigns, including for local businesses since 2010. And in that time I focused my strategies and also my systems so that I can continue to optimize Google Ads campaigns in the most efficient and profitable way. And one of the best tools that I've ever created and that I still use today is my Google Ads Optimization checklist. And with my optimization checklist, it lets you know exactly what you need to be optimizing in your Google Ads account every 72 hours, every week, every month and every 90 days. And if you would like to get a free copy right now, all you need to do is to follow the link in the description. So firstly, let's go through the difference between call ads and and call extensions. So with call ads, the format and the look of your ad is actually a little bit different. What you can see through here with the call ad is that the phone number for your business actually appears as one of the headlines. And then from there you do have another two headlines that you can add. And you are restricted to showing your business name in the ad and then from there you can add in two descriptions. But with a call extension it is different in that the call part of the ad only appears at the bottom of a current ad that you have in your while your phone number is still present, it's not as highly visible as it is in the call ad where you have your business's phone number in bold and in blue right at the top of the ad. Now that you know the difference between these two type of ads, let's have a look at which is going to be better for your business. And over the past 12 months I've been running a campaign where we've had both call extensions and call ads active in the same account. And what I want to let you know is that there is a clear winner which is going to be better for your business, which is so let's take a look at these results. We're looking at results over a 12 month period from August 2021 through to the end of July in 2022. And up the top here is our campaign which has only got call extensions active. Whereas down the bottom here we have our two call only campaigns and the campaign which was running call extensions generated 158 conversions and that was for a cost of $32.33 per phone call. But these two combined call only campaigns generated a total of 1 and 18 phone calls at a cost per conversion of only $16.82. So the call extensions were a clear winner as they generated phone calls at a cost per conversion that was nearly half of that of call extensions. Even taking into account other conversion actions like your form completion, the call only campaigns still had a much better cost per conversion running in at $15 and $17 versus $21 for the campaign that only had the call extensions running. The only thing that I will the call only campaigns do have a higher cost per click at $5.91 and $6.47 versus $3.52. So because of that high CPC for core campaigns, you may want to firstly start with just a general Google search campaign and then once you find the best performing keyword themes so the keyword themes that are converting at the highest rate for the lowest cost, you can then move those keyword themes over to a call only campaign. But what I want to stress is that the clear winner and the better campaign for a local business who is looking to generate phone calls is to incorporate a call only campaign into your Google Ads account. So right now what we're going to do is I'm going to jump into that screen share so that I can take you through the step by step process in how you can set up your very own call campaign. To set up your own call campaign, you first want to go into campaigns and then press this blue Create campaign button and we're going to select a new campaign. And then I recommend that you select the leads function and then that'll bring us down to which campaign goals that we want to use for this campaign. And because we're wanting to focus this campaign purely on phone call leads, we want to remove any other conversion actions so that we've only got phone call leads. Now, if you don't have any call ad conversions set up already, you don't need to worry because when you set up your call ads, you can select an option to automatically set up this call tracking. And then we press continue. And we want to be using a search campaign. And to activate the call ads, what you do need to do is you need to click on this phone calls button, you select the country of origin, then you go through and select the country where your business is based. And then you need to add in your business phone number. And when it comes to naming your campaign, I always like to use a naming convention so we know exactly what we're talking about. So I'm gonna call this local call campaign, but you can call your campaign whatever you want to do, just making sure that it's something you can recognize so that when you're going through your reporting, you know exactly what you're looking at. Then we press continue. And this brings us to our bidding section. So we do want to focus this on conversions, but at the start, I would not be setting a cost per action. We're just going to keep this focused on conversions. Then we click next. Now, with this core campaign, you will notice that you don't have the option to include it in the display network. And I also remove this including in the search partners. This is just personal preference. You can include them if you want to. But the reason for why I do that is because I've never found that you get the same level of data or results by including these Google search partners. And then when it comes to locations, you want to select the countries where you want this campaign to run. So we can either select all countries and territories, the country where your business is based, or another location. And for this one, we're just going to type in Brisbane because we only wanted to focus on the city where our business is based. And then it comes down to this audience segment section. Now, if you've watched any of my videos, you know that I'm a big believer in adding in as many audience as possible. So what I do recommend is, I do recommend that you add in as many audiences as possible. So right now I'm not going to go through and add in all of these audiences. But it is highly important. So what I will do is I'll add in a link at the end of this video showing you how you can add in some more audiences and why you need to do this for your very own campaigns. In the small settings functions, this is where you can optimize your start and end dates and also your ad schedule. For your ad schedule, this may be something that you want to consider, especially if you have a business where you only answer the phone between Mondays and Fridays. What you can do here is you can select Mondays and Fridays and then put in the actual times and that you want your phone to ring. And in this example, we're going to put in from 7 o' clock in the morning through to 7 o' clock at night. And what this is doing is this is restricting and letting Google know that we only want these ads to show between Monday and Friday, between 7 in the morning and 7 at night. Then we click next and then we come to the section where we want to go through and add in our keywords. Now, for this example, this business is all about screens and blinds. And one of the products that we're going to be advertising is called Crimsafe. So we're just going to enter in some different keywords in and around that keyword theme. Now, for the purposes of this video, I've got other videos on my YouTube channel which you can go through and check, which take you through the full process and how to complete a keyword research. But right now, for this example, I'm just going to add in some keywords which I know we're going to be targeting for this ad group. And once we've added in some keywords, we come to the section where we add in our ads. Now, it is automatically populated our phone number that we added in. In the setup of this campaign, we also do need to add in a URL. And for this verification URL, one thing that we do need to point out is that the phone number that is visible in your ad does to appear on the website that you're directing people to go to. This can be a landline or a mobile, it doesn't matter which one it is. But what you do need to make sure is that once again that this phone number here is present on the website. Now, I've gone through and added in the headlines, the business name and the descriptions. So we've got our ad completed in here. And then this is the section if you don't have your conversion tracking Set up already. You can use the account settings call from ads and that'll automatically set up your conversion tracking for you. Then we press Next. I've already got some ad extensions added to this ad, so this will automatically add in things like my site extensions and my call out extensions. It does give the option if you want to add in some image extensions. I do recommend that, but I won't be doing this right now. And then we go through and click Next. And then it's a matter of setting up our budget and we want to start this at $10 a day, which will be broken out to about $300 a month. Then we click Next. The final step is it'll bring us to this Review your campaign section we go through and just make sure we're happy with all of the details. And when we are, we just press publish campaign. Now that you know how to correctly set up your core campaign, the next important step is you need to know how to review all of this data. Because with your core campaigns, you can see the time that the person has made the call, what search keyword triggered that phone call, the duration of the phone call, and even the user's phone number. And if you want to see how to see all that data in your Google Ads account, I want you to go through and watch this video right here. And then finally, when I was taking you through that step by step process, I spoke a little bit about audiences and the importance of adding these to your campaigns. And if you'd like to learn more about audiences, go through and watch this video right here. Thank you again. See you next time.