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phone booth
Not a smartphone.

This is a long time coming, and boy, is it big.  Yes, this is Google news related to telephones, but we won’t talk about Nexus One (still).

Google is launching pay-per-call advertising.  Now.

There have always been variants of pay-per-call available, but this shows how serious Google is about invading the local search advertising space.  The program, announced today via email before Google’s other announcement, is arguably more important and profitable in the long run.  Here’s how it works:

  • A business will get a 5th line in a Google advertisement that shows a local phone number on smartphones (or as Google calls them, “high end mobile devices”)
  • Google says they’ll check the phone’s location and show the phone number for a nearby business.
  • The searcher simply has to scroll to your number and click.
  • Advertisers get the full range of analytics and metrics associated with keywords, this time with a telephone call as the conversion.

The best part for advertisers is the cost.  Pay-Per-Call has traditionally cost a much higher rate than a click to a website.  For now, anyway, Google is keeping the rate the same.  That’s quite a bargain for advertisers.

Meanwhile, the infighting with Microsoft continues.  Google described the covered phones as “iPhone, Android, Palm WebOS”, but didn’t mention Windows Mobile.  I asked Brandon Miniman, the CEO of leading smartphone site pocketnow.com, about the omission and the future of Windows Mobile in an Android and iPhone world.

“Windows Mobile is becoming less relevant because version 6.5 offers no big innovations and is mostly unchanged from a decade ago. That said, Microsoft has been working on Windows Mobile 7 for many years. When released in 2010, it could finally bring Microsoft back into the smartphone arena,” said Miniman.

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Google has launched a search site listing certified professionals and marketing agencies.

From the company’s description:

Google Advertising Professionals are not Google employees, but rather are online marketing professionals, agencies, and other individuals such as search engine marketers (SEMs), search engine optimizers (SEOs), and marketing consultants. They have been certified by Google to manage AdWords accounts. To become qualified, professionals must demonstrate an in-depth understanding of AdWords by passing exams, and they must meet all our qualification guidelines

You may not have a need for an Internet marketing agency now, but it’s a handy resource to bookmark.    Then again, since you’re here at Big Thinking for Small Business, save some time and bookmark our Google Advertising Professionals listing.

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Browser resolution may be a new SEO metric. It's certainly good usability practice.
Browser resolution may be a new SEO metric. It’s certainly good usability practice.

Google launched another tool hot on the heels of last week’s  release of Speed Tracer, a tool developers can use to determine what elements on a particular web page are slowing down its display in a browser.  And last month, we told you that a new SEO frontier for 2010 would be speed, as in how fast the site renders.

Now comes Google again with a tool that shows how much of a web site is visible for a particular monitor and video card. Browser Size is not a plugin or standalone problem.  Instead, a simple Google page allows anyone to type a web address and see how much of that page is visible to web users based on Google’s data about browser resolutions without scrolling.

Tools like this have existed for a long time, but not with built in Google metrics. Refinements will come.  Some sites will receive more visitors from people with smaller or larger screen resolutions.  Imagine the site designed for a certain width that receives a larger percentage of visitors with smaller resolutions?  Might Google someday begin penalizing such sites or demoting their ranking when the search engine knows the browser resolution as it displays the search engine results?