Chris Sherman, from Search Engine Watch offered some insight into how pay per call had changed since it was first thought up several years ago. Then it was dismissed as it would never happen.
Chris introduced Marc Barach, from Ingenio, who expressed how pay per call and other pricing alternatives offer more value to advertisers in the long run. He says that the SME market these days as segmented, it competitive and it depends on many different variables. He goes into how SME companies are segmented into several others. He describes that the type of business vertical, size, location, price point, customer value varies which in segments of the market. He then showed a graph of that showed the percentage of people that are buying advertising from companies like Google and Overture, these are all business with websites. Outside this market are businesses with brochure ware business website, and then about 9.8 million business without websites.
So what is Pay Per Call Advertising? It is performance based advertising that extends reach of a company through the purchasing of calls. Chris goes describing how product innovation drives industry growth. He says there are barriers in online advertising. One of the prime issues is ROI, or tracking. Also, a website that excepts transactions or is usable. He says one of the ways that pay per call is largely more beneficial is that ability to track and know the conversion rate. The phone has been around for 100 years, people are very comfortable using it. He makes a good point. Taking out the website eliminates some of the complexity of determining the ROI. \
He describes how his company takes pay per call orders. Customers can select the categories for which to display there ads. They can then set the amount they wish to pay per call, base rate appears to be $2.00 per click. He says some companies are willing to pay up to $35 per lead with average sales of $2500 per call. He says it works very well for many industry from auto to travel to industry.
Next up is Dan Ballister from Findwhat who will be describing how FindWhat is doing to integrate the pay per call option into their system. He starts with some history such as the first banner in 1994, then to 1997 that the yellow pages are dead, or if you�re not on the web then your competitors will be, or even better you need to reinvent your company on the web. Was its that bizarre that long ago? Times have changed as Dan just said. The lesson learned from the mid-90�s � Instead of helping advertisers to use the web to augment their existing business, we told them they needed to reinvent their business online. Now its 2005, we know what�s in front us. He says that most business are not ready to compete for or buy PPC yet. They all have phones though. Conversions improve from online to on-phone to on-premise. Some services and products require live consultation. Channel-agnostic marketers will leverage any worthy conversion vehicle they can find. Where was pay per call in 1997?
Pay per call is surprisingly uncomplicated product. All it requires is title, phone number and description. Findwhat gets there database of 1-800 from Ingenio apparently. Bizjournals.com is an example of one of the sites that has ads that use pay per sale ads in their search results. I see opportunity for this in a variety of areas, this session is pretty encouraging for the future of this product. He then goes into some websites that are early adopters of this technology. Such as web designers, career trainers, business, industry, and several others. He also goes to explain how the advertisers are seeing increased conversions for pay per call. They are renewing the advertising and are coming back for more. Findwhat says it�s working very well.
Some take aways from the session. Many of the largest internet advertisers already buy ONLY on a CPA basis. Isn�t that good enough for you too?
Companies to check out doing pay per sale marketing:
FindWhat.com InsiderPages.com ThomasB2B.com Snap
