Adwords ads - yes, they are.

They have been around forever. I mean if you are a plumber do you really want people to visit your website -- it is best to just call.

Doesn't Google lose money on those? I thought they were paid by the click and if people call then they won't click.

Apparently they have increased click through rates.

[webmasterworld.com...]

What if you called the number in the ad, and a recorded message came on telling you "for more information, please click on the ad that you got this number from". Wouldn't that count?

I mean if you are a plumber do you really want people to visit your website -- it is best to just call.

Uhh... that defeats the whole purpose of a pay per click advertising system.

I guess it's fine if google concludes that it mostly brings credibility to the ad and people end up clicking still (it makes sense, who would call a company based on 3 small lines of text somewhere on a web page). But if it's to evade completly paying for your ads, that's dishonest and should be ground for a ban.

I think some Google ads are set to pay by impressions, maybe Google sets the ads with telephone numbers to pay impressions in addition to clicks?!

I mean if you are a plumber do you really want people to visit your website -- it is best to just call.

Exactly. And what if an ad says something like: "toll free consultation" or "special discounts for the first 200 callers"

The phone number in the ad thing works the opposite of the way you think it would. I haven't advertised on AdWords for a few years now, but back when I did I had the same idea ... "Oh, I'll put the phone number on it so I could save money on clicks".

What it did was INCREASE my click-thrus. What happens is that displaying a phone number ads credibility to your site - a lot of places don't want to talk to you on the phone anymore. When people see a phone number, it sends them the message that the company is worth looking at because you can get someone on the phone. So they always clicked, but they weren't any more likely to buy.

On ads where I said things like "call for best price" they would click AND call, which ultimately costs me twice as much. They would click to see what the website price was, then call to see how much better the phone price was.

So in conclusion, there weren't really any savings in the advertising budget by doing this. I didn't get any more web-only sales out of it this way, but I did get more phone calls and sales. No one ever called and didn't click, they either just clicked or clicked and called.