The guy who cuts my hair owns the salon. A 1/4 page ad in the Cleveland-area Yellow pages could be negotiated down to $500/month by a knowledgeable business owner. To justify these prices, the phone company offered to provide a special phone number just for the ad upon which it would keep statistics. He ended up paying a company to send out a fancy, wedding-like invitation for salon services to new homeowners in affluent areas around his business -- $6/pop. Then, he used his $15K salon software to track lifetime customer value so he could figure out if spending $700/month was worth it.
Perhaps Google ought to link Google Voice accounts with adwords to provide better end-to-end conversion statistics. Perhaps the business owner could be provided with a speech-to-text transcription of these calls so he could somehow link his ad spend to eventual conversion.
I don't know much about conversion tracking across advertising methods. It would be cool to build a system for, say, a pizza shop owner (85-ish % of pizzas are sold w/ a coupon) to track conversions across phone, walk-in, and net-based ordering. When a small business like that spends a couple thousand a month (if not more) on advertising, it doesn't take a very big improvement in efficiency to justify a $100/mo SaaS fee.
http://www.reachlocal.com.au/ use AdWords campaigns and customised phone numbers to track referrals by phone. Client of mine use them. Not quite as "all in one" and affordable as AdWords+Voice would be, but the same sort of thing is being done by a third party.
Perhaps Google ought to link Google Voice accounts with adwords to provide better end-to-end conversion statistics. Perhaps the business owner could be provided with a speech-to-text transcription of these calls so he could somehow link his ad spend to eventual conversion.
I don't know much about conversion tracking across advertising methods. It would be cool to build a system for, say, a pizza shop owner (85-ish % of pizzas are sold w/ a coupon) to track conversions across phone, walk-in, and net-based ordering. When a small business like that spends a couple thousand a month (if not more) on advertising, it doesn't take a very big improvement in efficiency to justify a $100/mo SaaS fee.