Contact Form Extensions: Lead Capture

It's no news Google was offering a new service for Adwords advertisers: contact form extensions. It might be news to hear if you didn't already sign up for it, it's too late – at least for now. The cut-off was January 18th, 2010; technically, since that was Martin Luther King day, the cut-off was more than likely the Sunday before or even Friday the 15th, since we're not sure Google works on weekends.

This new lead capture function – currently in beta – is yet another extension opportunity added to Google's ever-burgeoning list (including local extensions and sitelinks extensions). While other ad enhancements – such as listing a city, address or even a map within an Adwords ad – might seem intuitive information to provide a search engine user, what are the ramifications of listing out a contact form right from the SERP?

Since this is a brand-new feature and most likely isn't very easy to find, this'll be all conjecture but here are some of the pros and cons:

Pros:

• CPA at point of CPC: Normally cost-per-action (CPA) marketing is more 'involved' than cost-per-click (CPC) advertising. Why? Because in a CPA model, the advertiser only pays after the visitor has clicked on an ad, gone through a funnel/process and THEN filled out a form. With Google's contact form extensions, advertisers get to acquire the lead for the cost of a click.
• Information capture: Google takes care of acquiring the information and providing the lead ID or PIN to the advertiser in an email. Once the advertiser receives this information, they can call the designated phone number to retrieve the lead information. Pretty slick.
  

Cons:

• #1 spot only: Only those ads showing up in the number 1 sponsored position can display the contact form extension. This means the ad had better already be at its best before entering into the program.
• Max CPC: If your ad does show up in the #1 spot, and a visitor does fill out the form, you'll end up paying your maximum cost-per-click for that lead. Might not be a big deal for everyone, but some markets out there are pretty competitive.
• Sales cycle: When you offer a user a contact form right from a CPC ad, can you be sure where you're hitting them in the buying cycle? What if they're merely looking to gather as much information as possible?
• Harder sales pitch: Piggybacking off the sales cycle concern, these types of leads (i.e., those leads who've come in via 'spray-and-pray' for information) are much more likely to need a lot more information, convincing and sales talent in order to close.
• Web users: Because we've worked with all types of web users, the question must be asked...will the average Joe surfing the Internet looking for information know to click on that plus sign to even find the form?

It seems our con list outweighs the pro, but of course our opinion – or, for that matter, of anyone – at this point is just that. Only time and statistics will tell how this new Google extension will fare.