Click-to-message Ads Gets Three Updates

Over the next few weeks, Google will be making some updates to Click-to-message Ads allowing advertisers to use Email Forwarding and to set Automatic Replies. Google will also be updating the reporting metrics, making it easier to define success with Click-to-message Ads.
What’s updated?
Email Forwarding
You can now send text messages straight to your email so that you no longer have to provide a phone number to use click-to-message ads in Google Ads. What this option will also do is it will send an automatic reply as a text back to the customer.
Automatic Reply
You can now send a preset message back to the customer as soon as they message you. Part of the frustration from a user experience with Click-to-message Ads is that the responses often aren’t quick enough. Having an automatic reply set should help potential customers feel more at ease with the service that you are providing them.
Reporting Improvements
You can now report on Message Conversions. This means that you’ll be able to define the number of initiated exchanges by the user needed to count as a conversion.

What does this mean for you?
It should help improve the effectiveness of Click-to-message Ads
It feels similar to what Facebook have already been doing on Messenger via Business Pages. Having this quick response to customers is invaluable so that you don’t keep them hanging!
As well as this, being able to define the number of exchanges needed to convert a customer can be useful in defining the effectiveness of Click-to-message Ads.
Top Tip – To better measure the effectiveness of your click-to-message ads better, you could set a different number for your message extensions and monitor the number of conversions you get from a lead using your own data.
Test it out using the Lean Analytics Model
I’m a huge fan of testing, testing, testing. You can use the Lean Analytics framework to help structure your testing:
Definition | |
Metric | Define the metric that matter most. You’ll use this to define success. It should only be one. |
Hypothesis | Outline the thinking behind the test. For example, ‘By doing X, we expect to see Y’ |
Experiment | Outline the experiment, including timings |
Act | What were the results, and what are the next steps? |
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