For a long time, Google has been improving the ability to contact businesses directly from Ads with call extensions allowing customers to call directly or message extensions allowing direct messaging.  We’ll now Google is testing in BETA the ability for customers to send an enquiry directly from a paid search result via Google Ads advertising.

This functionality has been available for a long time on Facebook and can be a powerful (and profitable) tool used in the right way.

Google’s support pages walk through the new functionality here for extensions:

https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/9363648?hl=en

While this functionality is great, just like Facebook’s lead forms which store a local spreadsheet file in a .csv on your buried on your facebook account somewhere you need to manually retrieve or configure automation to send elsewhere Google is taking the same approach.  You will have to download these leads manually unless you setup automation.

We set up automation for all of our customers Facebook lead form campaigns to send leads directly to their sales inbox or CRM.  We recommend this as an essential add on to not miss leads or leave them hanging while their hot when you could be serving your customers better with automation and making more sales!  To help this gap in the new tool google us also testing webhook support for retrieving the leads by external systems.  Google’s support for the new BETA lead forms webhook can be found here:

https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/9470385?hl=en

If you’re interested in understanding how you can leverage Google’s new lead form functions, get in touch.