Android recently earned the top spot in the world of mobility, but what does that mean for actual company income? Google has been very “hush, hush” about the figures, and there’s a lot of room for variability. Much of Google’s mobile advertisement, after all, takes a different form than their desktop environment versions. However, when it comes to one of the mobile advertising approaches, we know that Google has seen outstanding success. That approach? Click-to-Call, the mobile-specific advertising option that was released just one year ago.
According to a recent report, Google’s Surojity Chatterjee stated that the company is seeing “millions of calls every month,” and that the Click-to-Call option has become a substantial portion of Google’s total mobile advertising market. The advertisement growth for these advertisements correlates to the growth of smartphones, meaning that areas like the U.S., UK, and Japan are seeing a lot of activity, while many other areas are not.
Advertisers must opt-in for the Click-to-Call advertisement, choosing to add a “phone extension” to their advertisement. This phone number is then made a possible target of the advertisement, allowing users to have the number automatically dial upon click. Chatterjee stated that these have been especially successful as “hyper local ads” — so much so that the company has now released a “call only” version for advertising, appealing even to advertisers who don’t have a full website.
Google runs a lot of experiments, and plenty of them wind up bloodied and drunk in a gutter somewhere, wondering why they ever left the home of their creator’s mind. However, the investment in these experiments is a simple logistical wisdom for Google, since a single success — like Click-to-Call, with its millions of monthly callers, or Android, with its 615% global growth rate — can compensate for a giant stack of failures (real estate search, Google Wave, Google Buzz, Goog411, etc.).
