Marketers Spent $4 Billion On Click-to-Call Advertising In 2014 — Report

Lack of keyword attribution creates a "blind spot" for search marketers.

Call analytics platform Marchex released a report today that argues mobile call extensions were a roughly $4 billion revenue driver for Google (and Bing) in 2014. However the company says click-to-call ads are a “blind spot” for marketers because there’s no keyword attribution available.
Accordingly there’s a good deal of inefficiency in click-to-call ads today. To address that issue Marchex is introducing a product called “Call Analytics for Search,” which integrates with DoubleClick, Kenshoo and Marin Software to provide visibility on which keywords are actually generating calls — something that Google doesn’t (and probably can’t) provide.
Based on Google statements and data, Marchex projects that in 2015 there will be more than a billion calls generated by click-to-call ads in mobile search in the US market. The $4 billion revenue figure comes from internal calculations based on the company’s knowledge of call advertising and a weighted average of the cost of call-based ads in a range of verticals.
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