Barry Schwartz reported yesterday (based on a discussion forum post) that Click to Call/PPCall appears to be live in the UK. Here’s an example result (I couldn’t find any others and it may not appear when you click the link).
Holidays from Leeds
We’ll find all the latest holiday
deals flying out of Leeds-Bradford
Directline Holidays
When you click the link it opens a field for your phone number, which is remembered. Note that this isn’t a local business. Directline Holidays is a UK travel aggregator, undoubtedly with a call center. This is one of the “use cases” for PPCall as well as for local, small businesses.
What’s also curious about this is that it’s not like the model announced with Skype/eBay, which is currently slated for US roll out next year, and calls for users to have either Google Talk or Skype installed. The UK approach on display above is the way Google was previously doing it in its US test.
It may be that Google “defaults” to this approach in the US for everyone who doesn’t have the software, but then no one would be motivated to download Skype and/or Google Talk. That appears to be at least part of the reason for doing it the way that was announced. Curious.
It’s also worth noting that while Google said it would never have graphical ads on Google SERPs, you now have phone and Checkout shopping cart icons on google results (the top sponsored link). It makes me wonder what additional icons/ad opportunities may be developed in the future. (Google will be cautious in rolling out more, but I bet there will be some.)
Screenwerk 