Advertisers can now add a location specific business phone number in mobile ads that appear on mobile devices with full Internet browsers, such as the iPhone. When users want to call a business, instead of visiting its website, they needs to simply click on that phone number.

Since customers on mobiles are more likely to prefer to call a business than to browse through a big website, this feature will be an added convenience users. The feature will be good for advertisers as well, as it enables customers to contact them more easily.

For businesses with outlets in several locations, the number of the outlet closest to the user’s geo-location, as determined by the mobile phone’s location detection service or via Google’s My Location service, will appear on the screen. If a user wishes to call an outlet in any other location, he can do so by entering that location in his search query.

The cost per call will be the same as the cost per click for the advertiser.

Advertisers have already reported better click-through rates and increased phone calls during the beta tests of this service.

To show this ‘click to call’ number alongside their local business ads, advertisers will have to set up location extensions and then add their business phone number. They must then check that the option to show ads on smartphones has been selected in their campaign’s settings.

AdWords reports will show the number of calls they receive, thus allowing them to judge the effective the service is. In order to see click to call statistics separately, advertisers must go to the ‘Campaign Summary’ tab in the AdWords account, click on ‘Filter and Views’, then select ‘Segment by’ from the drop down menu and ‘Click Type’.

tapMatch

Companies can now advertise their products on this service by bidding on keywords and categories. The ads will then be displayed on mobile web pages and above mobile search results.

Jumptap claim that the service uses technology to relay ads very selectively, so that advertisers do not waste their money.

The service allows advertisers to target ads to certain handset models such as the Blackberry and iPhone. Google AdWords mobile ads do not currently provide device targeting. Like Google, other targeting options such as location, mobile carrier and language are also be available on tapMatch.

In the past pay per click mobile ad services have not been able to target audiences too well, in spite of the personal nature of the medium. TapMatch will allow advertisers to select their target audience by building client profiles through various sources such as search queries, context and previous click-through history of the client. Accordingly only appropriate and relevant ads will be shown to the mobile user.

Additional levels of audience demographic targeting present in the ad delivery system are expected to produce high levels of user engagement, which should eventually translate to high a conversion rate for advertisers.

Signing up for tapMatch is easy. Advertisers who are used to Google AdWords will find the process of signing up and setting up campaigns to be remarkably similar.

Pricing of these ads will be auctioned just as it is for Google AdWords. Advertisers will be required to pay only if the user carries out one of the click actions the service offers, which include:

• Sending users to a website
• Displaying an SMS landing page that includes a title, 250 character description, an image and instruction to text something to a short number
• Capturing an email address via a landing page that includes a title, 250 character description, an image and a text box with a button to capture user email addresses
• Showing a phone number on a landing page with a title, 250 character description and an image – this would have worked better as a pay per call action
• Delivering a 250 character marketing message along with a title and image.

In theory, all these features seem very interesting. However, reality might show that tapMatch has a long way to go before it provides serious competition to the likes of Google, mainly due to the higher volume of mobile users that default to the search giant even for their mobile search needs.