Instead of footing your Google Adwords bills, Adviso is giving away a simple and effective method to advertise for free on mobile devices with Google Adwords. Interested? Read on.
Our strategy takes advantage of an Adwords for iPhone loophole. Here’s how it work:
1) It is now possible to create Adwords ads specifically for iPhones and other mobile devices with full Internet browsers (G1,…)
2) A phone number can be added to an Adwords Ads (which fully complies with Adwords editorial guidelines)
3) Any phone number appearing on an iPhone screen can be clicked to make a call
4) Since the click isn’t made on the ad URL, it doesn’t count as a “real” click. Therefore, it costs nothing to the advertiser since only real clicks are accounted for on PPC campaigns.
Our strategy obliviously favours the advertiser financially, but it can also benefit the users since a phone number is oftenly what mobile device users are searching for at the first place, especially for local related searches (restaurant, hotel, taxi,…) .
Free advertisement, good usability, can this be too good to be true? Maybe.
First of all, we all know that Adwords favors high click-through ads, and having ads with were purposely created not to be clicked can be problematic, but still manageable. The advertiser can increases his bids and some ads will be clicked anyway, which combined, will still leads to a very low cost per lead.
Secondly, some have argued in the comments section of our original post (in French) that our strategy might not be effective at all, since some people may wants to visit the advertiser website before to place a call. I strongly disagree with this because: 1) the user can still click the ad URL if he really wants to visit a website, 2) I definitely prefer to have a direct conversation over the phone with a client instead of relying on my website conversion rate, no matter how good it is.
Finally, Google can patch this loophole by preventing phone numbers to be added in ads targeted at mobile devices, which would be legitimate and difficult to circumvent.
In conclusion, although mobile devices are still to become widespread, hurry and use Adviso’s strategy to get free clients using Google Adwords.
PS. This strategy would also works with Skype’s click to call script for Firefox.
See the original post in French from my collegue Simon Lamarche at Innovation web
