Understanding Pay Per Call Advertising
Advertising never seemed so dynamic as now. With every year, new trends come in, merging many of the older trends, improvising on the existing ones leveraging the latest technologies. It happened last year! The refreshingly unique, simple and highly useful concept of advertising- the pay-per-call.
This concept was introduced by Ingenio, a San Francisco based company last April. They have obtained the patent rights for the main technology the enables this concept; this deals with a call switching software and hardware that tracks and routes 800 numbers calls made by customers. FindWhat.com, the Internet marketing company, has tied up with Ingenio to distribute this concept. FindWhat is starting the campaign by placing the ads on hundreds of search engines including Lycos, Verizon MetaCrawler, Excite, NBCi, and Search.com etc.
The Concept
Pay-per-call works on similar principles as pay-per-click campaigns. You (advertiser) place an advertisement, a banner ad or a simple text ad, with the campaign provider. You define your keywords for which you want your ads to appear, the category and geographical area that you want to target.
Your ad will typically have a title, a small description about your business just as you write for a pay-per-click campaign. But in place of your web site URL which people click on and reach you, in pay-per-call you provide a toll free number. When a customer queries using the key phrases you have placed your ad for, your ad will be displayed. Interested customers can call you on the toll free number, which redirects to your actual number and from here you can take on the customer personally through your sales person.
The Cost
You pay only when you receive a call and not otherwise. How much you would pay can be decided by you; you need to bid at the start of your campaign. Depending on how much you bid for, your billing could vary from $2 to $20. FindWhat, the distributor of the campaign typically allows you to bid any amount, starting at a minimum bid of $2. the first 10 minutes of your call is free (it only costs what you bid!). For every minute after that you pay 10 cents. For 10 days from the first call, the customer can call you back at no additional charges.
The Advantages
Pay-per-call is a more lucrative solution than pay-per-click form of advertising. The advantages of the campaign are,
One-to-One Customer Interaction
In a pay-per-click campaign, the customer clicks on your ad and reaches your web site. But this could mean nothing to your business. What you need is to interact with the customer, open and close the sale. This is exactly what the pay-per-call campaign does! The customers see your ad and if they think you have the product or service they need, they will call you. You can put the customers to your sales persons directly and close the sale. The chance of a sale being made is thus higher in such a campaign.
Immediate Tracking of ROI
Since you interact directly with the people who reach you through the ads, you know whether these prospective customers have actually become your customers or not. Thus you can easily track your ROI. Igenio has sophisticated software that helps you track your ROI real time.
Web Presence Without Having a Site
Many of the small and medium sized businesses do not have a web site; some may not possess the required infrastructure to handle web site driven queries; others may cater only to small local population and having a full fledged web site may be complex and even unnecessary expense for them. Such businesses largely depend on direct interaction with the customers, mainly through phone. Using the pay-per-call campaigns, such businesses can get people to call them. Phone calls have a better chance of being converted to sales than a click. Thus pay-per-calls can generate more leads.
Cocktail Mix - The Latest in Pay-per-call
Ingenio partnered with FindWhat to distribute the first pay-per-call campaign in last April. Currently, they have entered a strategic partnership with the online yellow pages provider go2. The pay-per-call in conjunction with local search and wireless is bound to be a great combination and such a marketing mix is likely to be the next biggest thing in advertising.
Engines like Google, Yahoo and others offering local search options now, would find it more useful to offer pay-per-call campaigns. This means they can create a larger database for more and accurate search results for the customers. A study by JupiterResearch showed that the local search market is expected to grow from $502 million in 2004 to $824 million in 2008.
Ingenio’s agreement with go2 ensures that listings from the Ingenio’s pay-per-call campaigns will feature in go2 directory listings. The biggest thing here is that these listings would be made available both online and over wireless Internet users; This is possible as go2 has partnerships with many wireless carriers like Alltel, AT&T Wireless, Boost Mobile, Cingular, Nextel, Sprint PCS and Verizon Wireless. Studies indicate that there are an estimated 170 million mobile phone users in North America. Thus local businesses can now move up by bidding more per call so as to appear on top of the listings for local searches both online and in the mobile search queries.
The Numbers and What They Mean to you
| Total Number of small Business | 14 million |
| Number that use pay-per-performance | 250 thousand |
| Number of businesses without a web presence | 9.75 million |
| Number of business with a brochure-ware web site | 4 million |
| Number available for Pay-per-call | 13.75 million |
A market acceptance study conducted in march 2004 by JupiterResearch shows that:
- 48% of the advertisers surveyed showed in pay-per-call advertising solution.
- 42% of they would be more interested in generating leads from pay-per-call rather than pay-per-click.
- 85% of the advertisers were sure of the ROI through phone and were not clear about the conversion rate from the website driven traffic.
- 40% of the advertisers showed interest in allocating new budget for their pay-per-call advertising.
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