Adwords Call Extensions for Canadian Advertisers

Google has started sending out notifications to Canadian Adwords advertisers advising them of upcoming enhancements to ads that you may be running with your phone number included in the body text.

• Aimed at helping users viewing your ads on a mobile phone, all phone numbers in your ads will automatically be changed to a click-to-call phone number. This means mobile users can simply click the number and call you - something not currently possible on most phones.
• You will be charged for these calls as if they had clicked on your ad - something that wasn’t happening when they called your number previously.
• If you are already using call extensions AND have a number in your ad, only the number in the ad will be clickable and your call extension will no longer be active. This is apparently aimed at avoiding the confusion that would arise if two phone numbers were to show up.
• You will be able to track calls placed using the click-to-call number by campaign, ad group, keyword and individual ad.

You could simply leave your phone numbers in your ads and Google will take care of everything for you. However, to get the most value from click-to-call number, you should seriously consider creating a Call Extension with your phone number. There are a number of benefits to doing this, one of which is that with a manually created Call Extension your business phone number appears as an additional line of ad copy which frees up space in your ad creative for extra promotional copy.

For information on creating Call Extensions please see this adwords help article.