Click-To-Call (CTC) is an idea that is elegant in its simplicity: If someone is browsing on their mobile phone and comes across an ad they find interesting, instead of sending them to a webpage, why not let them call you directly?

Instead of sending the user to a webpage when their phone is already out, you can instead prompt them to give you a call via the ad and allow them to do so with a simple click.

This little beauty of mobile advertising genius has been cooking since 2009. You may have already seen some of the ads yourself because of this, even though the feature was only in beta for the time. A CTC ad is basically the standard Google ad you’d find on your browser: Headline, two lines of body text, and a website, but with an additional line for a clickable phone number link that allows users to instantly call with a click instead of them having to go to the website and look around for the number.

With this, you can specifically focus your ad to get your potential customer call you ASAP instead of mulling it over or looking somewhere else with their search. Since a call costs the same as a click to your ad, you can completely focus on fostering phone interactions with your desired audience via your mobile campaigns.

Say for example that you were offering a special marketing seminar in Vegas. With these ads, you could target people on their mobiles and create a special deal that they can only get by calling your number, which gets them to book faster by getting them to speak to you (or most likely your sales associate in that case) right then and there, which gives them less time to mull the decision over.

With mobile advertising experiencing a huge percentage of growth in the past 2 years, I expect CTC ads to make a huge impact in the years to come.

Do you think CTC is something you can use in your business today, or would it be better suited for your local pizza parlor? Share your thoughts or prove me wrong in the comments below.

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