Getting 'Wrong Number' Calls From Your Google Ad Campaign

You have a new Google Ad Campaign setup to generate calls for your business. You even have the Call Ad Extension set up so prospective customers can call your business directly from the Google Ad, without clicking over to your website.

Everything seems to be going fine but you've noticed an influx of people calling your business thinking they're calling a competitor of yours. Sometimes this can be a sales opportunity but most times this is likely to be an existing customer of one of your competitors. In other words, they already spent their money with your competitor.

Sure you could try to add all the competitor terms as 'negative keywords' in Google Ads or only target phrase match or exact match keywords, but these are inferior solutions.

First off, there is a seemingly unlimited number of competitor terms. Just when you think you have them all as a negative keyword, others pop up. It's like playing a game of wack-a-mole!

Also, competitor terms can be some of your highest converting keywords. This is because a good percentage of people searching for your competitors have yet to become their customer or patient and they're far enough down the sales funnel that they practically have their credit card out ready to take action.

Second, only using phrase and exact match keywords is also not a great solution since broad match has been shown to perform better on some campaigns and you don't know until you test. This means any campaign that doesn't allow for broad match keywords from the 'get go' is handicapped.

So what are you supposed to do?

You could try making the 'Call from ad' conversion tied to the Call Ad Extension a Secondary Conversion instead of a Primary Conversion. This way you'll be optimizing the campaign to increase the Primary Conversions, which happen on your website. This should eventually eliminate any 'wrong number' calls coming from the Call Ad Extension.

You could also just remove the Call Ad Extension from the campaign all together. This will reduce overall conversions on the campaign and your ad will take up less screen real estate in the Google SERPs but it's a potential solution as well.

If you do remove the Call Ad Extension, it's still good to make the 'Call from ad' conversion a Secondary Conversion because it's also tied to the location extension.