Work / client
An Australian taxi company
More calls, at less than half the cost, by telling Google which callers paid.
A taxi company paying for search advertising that produced phone calls, with no way of knowing which calls became rides and which were wrong numbers, competitors, or people asking the time.
The figures
- +27%
- more booking callsclient
- −56%
- lower cost per callclient
- $2.10
- average cost per clickaustralia
The client is named only with their permission.
In order
What we asked, recorded, learned and changed.
What we asked
Not how many calls the ads produced, which the platform already reported, but how many of those calls became a paid ride, and what each of those rides cost to buy.
What we recorded
Calls were moved onto a tracked line, so each one carried the campaign and the search that produced it. The company's own records of which callers became customers were matched back to those calls.
What it told us
A large share of the spend was buying calls that never became rides. The campaigns Google rated highest by clicks were not the ones producing paying customers.
What we changed
We built a list of the callers who paid and gave it back to Google as the definition of a good outcome, so its bidding aimed at people like them rather than at anyone who might dial. Booking calls rose by 27% while the cost of each call fell by 56%, in a market where a click costs $2.10 on average.
The lesson
The platform will optimise toward whatever you tell it counts. Tell it a phone call counts and it buys phone calls. Tell it a paying customer counts, with proof, and it buys those instead.