Should You Use The Google Ad Call Ad Extension for Local Lead Gen Campaigns?

Most of the Google Ad campaigns I manage for clients are what you would consider 'local lead gen' campaigns. The goal with these campaigns is, you guessed it, to generate leads (i.e. calls, form submissions, chat initiations, etc).

This is in contrast with Ecommerce type campaigns where the goal is to drive sales directly.

Setting up a Call Ad Extension on the campaign makes a lot of sense since it allows users to call the businesses directly from the ad without clicking over to the site. Also, the more ad extensions you have, the more screen real estate your ad will take up.

I generally see a lot of call conversions coming from the Call Ad Extension.

No brainer right? Yes, but there's a problem. Sometimes your ads show when a user is searching a competitor brand in Google and the user calls using the Call Ad Extension thinking they're actually calling a different business entirely.

This can lead to a false or low-quality conversion, depending on how many seconds it takes to trigger your call conversion.

Since I want to remove or filter these out of the campaign, I make sure to set the 'Call from ad' conversion as a 'Secondary Conversion'. This allows me to still report on how many call conversions came from the Call Ad Extension, but I'm no longer optimizing the campaign for the 'Call from ad' conversion.

Instead, I'm optimizing the campaign for the higher-quality 'Primary Conversions' that happen on the site. This will allow us to increase the quality of conversions coming from the Call Ad Extension over time and reduce/eliminate the number of false or low-quality conversions coming from Call Ad Extension.

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