Improvements on the way for Measuring Call Conversions in AdWords

New communication from Google today outlined changes coming at the end of this month (April 2014) to Call Conversions.

Google Said:

Dear AdWords Advertiser, People are constantly connected and engaging with businesses in many ways. Calls continue to be an important way for people to connect with your business, from wherever they’re searching. Your account (customer ID xxx-xxx-xxxx) uses call extensions with advanced reporting and phone call conversions. Upcoming changes to call extensions reporting will provide more flexible ways to measure calls as conversions.

What’s Changing

Currently, all calls from call extensions are grouped into one conversion action. (Conversion actions are the actions your customers can take that you count as a conversion, like signups, purchases on your website, or calls to your business.) Starting at the end of April 2014, these calls will be split into multiple conversion actions based on call length. This change offers you new options for reporting and bidding, including the ability to:

• Create conversion names for each of your account conversion actions. For example, you can create a conversion action named “Product 1” for calls longer than 60 seconds and another named “Product 2” for calls longer than 30 seconds. Then just choose which of these conversion actions you’d like to count for any ad group in your account.
• Apply custom conversion values to each of your conversion actions and edit call length settings in the Conversions page found in the Tools and Analysis menu
• Apply Target Return on Ad Spend (Target ROAS) bidding strategies to maximize call conversion value

Each call length that you’ve chosen to count as a conversion will automatically have an account conversion action set up for it––which you can edit or remove at any time.

How this affects your conversions

This change won’t affect the total number of conversions you see in your account. However, if you use multiple call durations, you’ll now see call conversions grouped by their conversion action names. For example: if you count 30-second calls and 60-second calls as conversions, you’ll now see these calls divided into two conversion names––one for each call length.

No action is needed

No action is required to take advantage of this new feature, but we recommend that you review your campaign settings to ensure the minimum phone call length for conversion tracking is up to date. With any change, it’s a good idea to monitor campaign performance closely so you can make updates to meet your AdWords goals. If you don’t want conversions from call extensions to be included in your standard conversions, just uncheck the option to ‘Count calls as phone call conversions’ in your call extensions settings or choose to use ‘My own phone number (don’t use call reporting)’ instead of Google forwarding numbers. Learn more

Pretty Cool if you ask me.  This allows advertisers better visibility into phone call activity, a more solid way to assign value a phone call based on duration, and a way to use bidding strategies in an attempt to maximize call conversion values.