Wondering how those big PPC affiliates rake in mountains of cash by promoting Pay Per Call Offers? It might seem like some secret club where only the elite can cash in, but guess what?
Today, we’re pulling back the curtain to reveal exactly how you can start with Pay Per Call and make a lot of money with Google Call Only Ads.
So, if you’re ready to stop wondering and start building your Pay Per Call affiliate business, then let’s dive in and learn everything you need to get started step by step and transform those calls into stacks of cash! 🙂
What Is Pay Per Call?
The Pay Per Call market is exploding right now especially in the US, and that means it’s time to jump in and multiply your revenues.
If you are already familiar with CPA marketing and lead generation, Pay Per Call is very similar. The biggest difference is that the desired action (conversion) is a simple phone call, instead of filling or submitting some kind of form.
Pay Per Call is a type of advertising and marketing that connects businesses directly with potential customers through phone calls. Advertisers establish specific criteria that a call must meet before they’re willing to pay for it. This could include details like the caller’s location, the duration of the call, and even which buttons they press during an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system.
In simple terms, advertisers set up a special tracking number and outline the conditions that a call must meet to be considered a conversion. If a publisher sends over potential customers who meet these criteria using that unique tracking number, they get a commission.
What Are Google Call Only Ads?
Google call-only ads are designed to encourage users to call your business, and these types of ads only appear on devices that can make phone calls.
On these call only ads instead of the ad linking to a URL that goes to your website, offer, or landing page, the click will instantly call your business directly.
Here’s an example of how they look:
Google call only ads provide key information such as:
But what is that website URL for? Well, it’s just for show. Unlike regular ads that send users to a specific landing page, clicking on call only ads will automatically add the business’s phone number to the user’s dial pad.
And that’s not all – call only ads can also be beefed up with certain extensions, including:
Now, here’s a nifty feature: call only ads are programmed to only show up when your business is open, which is really useful. You don’t need to stress about getting charged for calls after the shop is closed for the night. It’s like having your own virtual storefront that opens and closes with your business hours.
How To Track Pay Per Call Campaigns
There is a crucial step you need to nail down before you launch your pay per call campaigns, which is setting up campaign tracking properly.
Let’s face it, tracking pay per call campaigns can be a bit of a headache.
Here’s an example: You launch your call-only ad on day one. Fast forward a week, and you’ve gathered a solid 50 calls to your offer thanks to Google’s call tracking reporting.
But here’s the kicker: Do you know how many of those calls actually turned into sales? Sure, call tracking gets you part of the way there, but it doesn’t paint the full picture.
You’re left scratching your head, wondering if any of those 50 new leads ended up making a purchase. The main problem? Connecting the dots between those calls and the closed revenue.
Sure, you can track the number of calls that come in as a result of your ad, but that’s just not enough data.
To address this issue, you need to invest in a call tracking and attribution tool that goes the extra mile you need. These tools will not only track every inbound call but also follow that lead throughout their entire customer journey, and trust me, this is SUPER IMPORTANT!
Our favorite tool that we use to track all our Pay Per Call campaigns is called Ringba.
Ringba is one of the best inbound call tracking platforms designed specifically to track your Pay Per Call campaigns.
If you haven’t set up what we call an optimized RTB integrated ring-tree setup which is basically, a setup where the buyers are all sorted out and optimized, then you’ll need to take a different approach.
Here’s how it goes:
You’ll need to create a campaign where you manually add each offer, giving each one its own unique phone number and then seamlessly integrating it all with your tracking system.
Now, let’s not beat around the bush.. this process can get pretty darn complicated. I’m talking about freelancers in the USA charging a hefty sum, sometimes over $2000, just to set this up for you..
So, what did I do? I brought on board a full-time tech whiz to handle all the technical stuff – think conversion APIs, pixels, data sources on traffic platforms, and all that, and make sure it all runs perfectly with Ringba.
But guess what? Now you can tap into the expertise of my guy over at BannersLanders.
They’ll handle all the integrations for just a few hundred bucks, saving you thousands in the process.
So, you can get your campaigns up and running smoothly without breaking the bank!
Keyword Research
When you’re preparing to launch your Call Only ads campaign in Google, one of the first things you need to do before you launch is keyword research.
Targeting the right keywords is crucial. The keywords are like the building blocks of your campaign, the words or phrases that trigger your ads to show up when people search on Google.
Now, there are two types of keywords you’ll want to gather: positive and negative keywords.
Positive keywords are the ones you want to include in your ad campaign. These are the words or phrases that are directly related to your products or services, and that you want to target to reach your audience.
On the flip side, negative keywords are the ones you want to exclude from your campaign. These are the words or phrases that aren’t relevant to your offer, and that you want to avoid showing your call only ads for.
The goal here is to gather a keyword list of positive and negative keywords, as detailed as possible, filtering out all irrelevant queries.
Why? Because it’s all about minimizing your cost per click and ensuring you’re not wasting your budget on clicks that won’t convert into valuable leads.
You can use keyword tools to do your keyword research, some of them are completely free like the Google Keyword planner, and some offer premium features:
These tools can help streamline the process, making it easier for you to do your research and gather your keywords effectively.
We highly recommend using the official Google Keyword Planner tool, which taps into real Google search query data.
This tool provides invaluable insights into the popularity and competitiveness of different keywords, helping you make informed decisions for your campaign, and it’s completely FREE!
Now, when it comes to organizing your keywords, it’s crucial to divide them into distinct groups. Think of it as sorting your toolbox, each group serves a specific purpose and helps you better understand the search landscape within your niche.
For example, you might have general keywords that cover broad terms related to your industry, branded keywords that include the names of specific companies or products, and location-linked keywords that target users in specific geographic areas.
Let’s talk about branded and non-branded keywords for a moment.
Branded keywords, like “eHealth health insurance,” include the name of a specific brand or company. On the other hand, non-branded keywords, like “health insurance,” don’t mention any particular brand.
Now, here’s where things get interesting: when you’re working with branded keywords, you need to be careful. Just because someone searches for a specific brand doesn’t necessarily mean they’re interested in purchasing, they might simply be looking to visit the company’s website or find some general information.
That’s why it’s essential to exclude branded keywords that aren’t directly relevant to your campaign objectives. By doing so, you ensure that your call only ads are reaching users who are genuinely interested in what you have to offer, rather than those who are just browsing or already loyal customers.
Setting Up Matching Keywords
Google offers three matching options when it comes to setting up your call only ads:
Now, here’s the thing, when it comes to choosing the right matching option, it all boils down to your goals and budget. Are you looking to drive a high volume of clicks, or are you more focused on maximizing your conversion rate?
If you’re aiming for high volume, broad matching might be the way to go. It casts a wide net and can attract a larger audience, albeit with some less targeted clicks.
On the other hand, if you’re prioritizing accuracy and targeting, you might lean towards phrase or exact matching. While these options may attract less traffic, the clicks you do get are more likely to be from highly interested users, leading to better conversion rates.
Ultimately, it’s a balancing act between attracting traffic and ensuring that traffic is as relevant as possible to your campaign objectives.
How To Setup Google Call Only Ads Campaigns
Alright, time for the fun part, setting up call-only ads in Google Ads is pretty simple if you’ve got the right guidance.
So if your tracking setup is ready, and you gathered a nice list of keywords following the instructions above, you’re ready to launch your first Call Only Ads campaign.
If you have never run any Pay Per Call campaigns before in your Google Ads account, the first thing you need to do is to create a conversion action.
So Navigate to goals and select New Conversion Action to do that.
Next choose phone calls and ‘’calls to a phone number on your website’’
Next enter a name for the conversion action, set the value, and type in the phone number.
Next up, let’s tackle the Call Length, Attribution, and Window settings. Here’s what you need to do:
That’s it, when the conversion action setup is done, you can hop on over to your Google Ads dashboard. Go to Campaigns, click create new campaign, select leads as the objective and and make sure the selected conversion goal is the one you just created for phone calls.
Then select search as the campaign type, and Phone calls as your goal. You need to enter the same phone number you entered in the conversion goal settings, and click continue.
In the next step you can set the bidding.
You want to focus on conversion in this case, and you can also add a target cost per action, but I recommend leaving that for now and let google use the ‘maximize conversions’ bidding strategy.
You can always switch to set a target cost per action over time once you have data and results.
Next you need to set location targeting.
Select the countries or states that you want to target, obviously it depends on the offer you promote, in our case we are going to start with the entire United States, and later on when we have data we’re going to cut the bad performing states and focus only on the ones that are winning.
The next step is audience segments, you can select different audiences that you want to target, but we’re going to skip this step for now, because for Call Only Ads we like to focus on keywords targeting.
Also for a Call Only Ad campaign it’s better to keep things more tight and targeted, because we want to focus on people who are actually searching for the most relevant keywords to our offer.
That’s why we don’t want to use broad match keywords for the entire campaign, we are going to leave this option on OFF.
In the More Settings field, we can also schedule our campaign. It is very important if you run Pay Per Call campaigns because you need to consider call center work hours. You can’t just run 24/7 as then a bunch of calls won’t get answered. So you need to set up an ad schedule based on call center hours!
The next step is creating ad groups. Here we are going to add keywords from our well researched keywords list. If you have a lot of keywords, I recommend splitting them into separate ad groups.
As I mentioned before, for call only ads we want to focus on targeting people who are very likely to be interested in our offer, we can use ‘phrase match’ targeting for all of these keywords.
When we use phrase match for all keywords, Google is going to recommend expanding reach by upgrading keywords to broad match. But again, for Call Only Ads we are not going to do that, we want a tight targeting strategy.
After that you need to create your ads.
So the ad is going to look like this:
Phone number, business name, headline, description 1 and 2.
The final URL is optional when it comes to call only ads. For example you can use it to add the contact page of your website, where people can see more about your business, or you can create a nice landing page if you want, BUT if you do so, make sure the phone number on your website is the same exact number that you use in your call only ads.
Once your ad is ready (we recommend starting with at least 2 ads per adgroup) the next step is setting your budget.
Once you set the budget, you can click publish to submit your campaign for approval, and that’s it.
How To Optimize Call Only Ads Campaigns
Campaign optimization is a huge factor in determining success for Call Only Ads, and any kind of Google Ads actually, so you have to optimize regularly in order for your campaigns to be successful.
But keep in mind, once your campaign is live, you should give it a day or two before diving into optimization. But don’t just sit back and relax during this time, keep an eye on things, especially your tracking, to make sure everything’s running smoothly.
After that, it’s time to roll up your sleeves and dig into the data you’ve collected. Use that information to analyze how your ads and keywords are performing. Which ad groups, ads and keywords showing tracktion? And which ones are burning your budget?
Once you’ve crunched the numbers and analyzed the data, it’s time to take action. Use what you’ve learned to make data driven decisions to optimize your campaign.
Whether it’s tweaking your ad groups, adjusting your keywords, or optimizing your ads, let the data be your guide.
Since we’re running Pay Per Call campaigns, we can’t forget about the crucial ‘back-end’ optimization, especially when it comes to platforms like Ringba.
Here’s the lowdown:
Call tracking platforms like Ringba offer a goldmine of insights by allowing you to send back data to Google Ads at the ad group or keyword level. This means you can pinpoint exactly what’s delivering the best results for your campaign.
Call tracking also lets you keep a close eye on call curation, call volume, and other important metrics related to calls. By tracking these metrics, you can identify which ads and targeting parameters are driving the most calls and revenue.
But here’s where things get really interesting, don’t forget to dive into the call logs in Ringba.
This is where you can uncover any potential issues, like calls that didn’t connect or calls that didn’t convert. Take the time to investigate why these issues occurred, was it a technical glitch or something else?
And let’s not overlook the power of call recordings. Take a listen to the calls that didn’t convert and try to pinpoint where things went off track. Maybe there’s a common objection you can address in your ad copy, or perhaps there’s a misunderstanding about your offer that needs clearing up.
You can also retarget unconverted calls by syncing call data with your retargeting campaigns.
If you know a phone call didn’t quite seal the deal, you can retarget those callers with a targeted ad, giving them another chance to convert.
Now, here’s why this strategy is a game-changer: callers are typically highly engaged and top-quality prospects. So, by retargeting them, you’re focusing your efforts on a big pool of potential customers who have already shown interest in what you have to offer.
And the best thing is, by syncing call data with your retargeting campaigns, you can avoid the risk of retargeting someone who’s already converted over the phone. This means you can tailor your ads to different stages of the customer journey, whether they’re still considering their options or ready to make a purchase.
The bottom line? Use all this valuable data to make data driven decisions about how to optimize your campaign for better results. It’s all about optimizing your strategy based on real-world insights, so you can maximize the success of your Pay Per Call campaigns.
Conclusion
In conclusion, promoting Pay Per Call offers with Google Call Only Ads is a great strategy to directly engage with high-quality leads and drive conversions. By using call tracking platforms like Ringba and syncing call data with retargeting campaigns we can optimize our ad strategies to maximize ROI.
With the ability to laser target engaged audiences and avoid wasted ad spend, Google Call Only Ads provide a powerful solution for affiliate marketers to increase their revenue and scale their Pay Per Call business.
Following the steps outlined in this article will empower affiliate marketers to effectively run Pay Per Call campaigns and achieve great success in affiliate marketing.
