Jesse Haines with Google’s Mobile Ads Marketing Team writes, "Esurance developed an iPhone app that provides users with quotes, insurance information and claim resources. They also launched mobile optimized landing pages for the campaign so that potential customers could easily get information via the mobile web.  Additionally, Esurance ran click-to-call ads on both feature and high-end mobile phones.  With click-to-call, an interested person could get in touch with an agent to obtain a personal quote in just a few steps.  To track the results of the campaign, Esurance used unique 800 numbers in their ads and optimized performance as soon as the campaigns went live."

"The results were impressive. Esurance significantly reduced acquisition costs, acquiring customers at 30% less than through other marketing channels," continues Haines. "They also boosted conversion rates.  Click-to-call mobile ads drove a 30%-35% higher response and a 5-10% lower cost per click on mobile than on online."

The full case study is here. In it, Esurance’s director of online marketing Tolithia Kornweibel says, "Google mobile ads with click-to-call allow us to put an interested person in touch with a licensed insurance agent or dedicated claims representative, or obtain a personal quote on a mobile phone in just a few simple steps. Google’s mobile advertising solution is not only more convenient and faster for customers, but also is a less expensive lead acquisition vehicle for us."

Have you used Google’s Click-to-Call ad? Have they been successful for you? Let us know.

A post on the Inside AdWords blog explained today, "[W]e’re bringing the same click-to-call benefits to national advertisers through phone extensions.  Phone extensions allow you to add a phone number that will be displayed whenever your ad is triggered, regardless of the user’s location."

Here’s the upshot, then: "This enables customers to connect with your business by phone directly from the ad and can be especially useful if you have a call center to handle customer inquiries."

Advertisers should profit as a result of this development, considering that phone calls are more likely than clicks to lead to purchases.  Google looks set to make a lot of money, too, since this move will encourage corporations with big advertising budgets to give click-to-call ads a shot.

Perhaps the only losers will be the companies that don’t adapt quickly.  They’ll risk losing sales to competitors with more eye-catching and actionable ads.

This should save people who want to call companies a fair amount of time they might otherwise have to spend navigating a site.  It’ll also spare some smartphone owners the slight embarrassment of having to copy down a phone number on paper while using their multi-hundred dollar devices.

Google’s thought of one other way to make things easy on consumers, too.  A post on the Google Mobile Blog explained, "[T]he ads and phone numbers you see are based on your location.  So, if a store or restaurant has multiple locations, you’ll be calling the nearest one, and not making reservations in some other city."

Finally, let’s not forget that advertisers should appreciate this new option.  According to Google, participants in beta trial saw improved click-through rates and a more or less overall boom in business.

The continued adoption of mobile devices fuels that idea, and quite possibly Ingenio’s place in it. Major Internet players like AOL and Microsoft have made heavy pushes to the small screens of the mobile world.

Justifying that push means being able to monetize the traffic. Display and search advertising have a role, but Ingenio’s model represents something more effective.

For an advertiser, the value proposition comes when someone calls via an Ingenio link. The caller’s interest in the business has already been established. By virtue of searching by mobile for a local business, the caller represents a qualified lead.

Once the call has been connected, the advertiser pays and Ingenio collects its cut. The action drives this, not the search or the display. It’s measurable and likely of greater value to the business owner and the ad budget.

By The Kelsey Group’s 2006 Industry Sizing estimates of the potential pay per call market, 14 million websites look like good candidates. Here’s the kicker for the business owner: about 10 million of them don’t have a website at all, and 4 million only have “brochure-ware” sites.

With the ongoing push of Internet companies to the mobile world, we expect the value proposition of click to call to increase, as the market expands to $3.7 billion by 2010 per Kelsey Group’s numbers.

Click to call has the advantage of being a dead simple, straightforward way to connect customers and companies. Simple tends to win over complex when it comes to technology, in many ways, and Ingenio looks like one of those winners.

Word of its demise came from “Maps Guide Mike,” who, on the Google Maps Help Group forum, stated, “this feature was a long-running experiment, and in the end it was decided to discontinue it.”  There hasn’t been a single reply to Mike’s post, which may help explain how that decision was reached.

But Click-to-Call did have its followers.  Download Squad’s Grant Robertson calls the development “[s]ad news, as this was an innovative piece of Google’s heralded Maps service.”

Over at CenterNetworks, Allen Stern adds, “I, like Grant, liked this piece of technology.  Perhaps the GrandCentral acquisition has something to do with it?”

There are no real clues to Google’s thought process, however.  Maps Guide Mike only wrote, “There are however lots of other features we’re adding to maps in the hope of making it even more useful.  And if you are in the United States and liked click-to-call, check out a different experiment we’re doing.”  The different experiment is, somewhat ironically, GOOG-411.

It does raise an interesting question about the potential for abuse. What is to stop someone from simply clicking dozens of links and entering the phone numbers of friends, enemies or premium numbers?

I can see the spammers making their plans now. Within weeks we’ll hear about a wave of businesses receiving phone calls with recorded messages from an ousted prince in Nigeria.

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Andy Beal is an internet marketing consultant and considered one of the world’s most respected and interactive search engine marketing experts. Andy has worked with many Fortune 1000 companies such as Motorola, CitiFinancial, Lowes, Alaska Air, DeWALT, NBC and Experian.

You can read his internet marketing blog at Marketing Pilgrim and reach him at andy.beal@gmail.com.

The oddly brief statement appeared on Google’s home in the blogosphere, with the notation, “This message has been translated using Google language tools,” printed below the text of the message.

Here is what showed up on the blog today:

Google and eBay signed an agreement in August 2006 to work on “‘Click-to-Call’ Advertising and Technology Integration.” This was part of a multi-year deal that also places Google’s search and advertising on eBay’s international sites.

The click-to-call plans had been described as follows:

Let the speculation begin.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.