As Product Manager on the Mobile Ads Team with Google, Surojit Chatterjee, explained, most users that search for local businesses on their mobile devices do not necessarily want to access that businesses’ webpage. What these users want is a phone number they can call. For example if they search for a place to eat, they would much rather call a restaurant and make a reservation rather than visit that restaurant’s webpage.

For that reason Google announced a new feature that lets advertisers add a clickable local phone number to their mobile ads. This way the user who was looking for a place to eat just needs to click the restaurant’s ad to phone said restaurant. The feature works with Android and iPhone.

A problem could arise from clicking on an ad to call a business – you might be calling a restaurant that’s nowhere near you. This could happen if the restaurant we’ve been using as an example has more than one location. This situation has been taken into consideration by the Google team.

“The 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. You can use My Location to make sure you get search results that are tailored to your location. Of course, if you're going to be in another city next week and you want to call ahead to make your reservation, include the city in your search query to get the most relevant results,” explained Surojit Chatterjee.

In related news, Gmail has also taken a keen interest in delivering you ads. Gmail has always displayed ads in the right hand side of the screen, right next to the email’s body. Sometimes Gmail had problems figuring out which ads to display – keep in mind that Google’s philosophy is to present useful, relevant ads. Not any more, because Gmail will now display ads related to recent emails if it cannot decide what ads to link to the message you’re trying to read right now. More details on this one here.