Earlier this week, MediaPost ran an article on the pay per call market that focused on pay per call advertiser Radiator.com and pay per call marketplace Ingenio. Pay per call, much like the originator of the PPC acronym, pay per click, offers advertisers a performance based metric for connecting with customers. In the per click world, that performance metric consists of a visitor to their web site. In the call world this consists of a potential customer causing the phone to ring.
Pay per call has some powerful implications for web marketing, one reason being that it instantaneously expands the number of companies that can leverage the online advertising. An example of this are companies that do not have a website, such as the one I came across a few months ago while on a business trip to the Seattle area. I found myself riding in a Town Car instead of a taxi. After hearing what I did for a living, the driver mentioned how he and his brother would like to get more business for their cars but do not have a website and do not know about internet marketing. Imagine being in this position, not having web designers on staff or paid search affiliates / in-house gurus. What would you do?
Finding a good web designer is like finding a good dentist, lawyer, therapist, you name it. There exists an incredible supply but finding one usually means some form of research or more generally asking those in your network. And, even then, the likelihood of finding someone that meets your other criteria is tough. Even if you find the person, i.e. the web designer in this example, trying to find an affordable way to get online if you do not know about or feel comfortable with Google is also incredibly hit or miss. You may or may not know about one-off placements such superpages.com, or technology solutions such as Atlas, but chances are that any decent search engine management firm wouldn’t return your call.
Yet, you as the car service owner fall in a group of several million companies strong. And similar to search engine management firms, I can guarantee though, that almost none in the ad network / affiliate network / lead generation space would want to work with such a client. They clients spend $500 per month maximum but cost $2000 per month in human capital to manage. So where does such a small business go? This is where a company such as Ingenio (profiled in the Gord Hotchkiss’ MediaPost piece) fits, and it seems that they have made it work to a degree. They act much like an ad network, i.e. they sit in between the advertisers and the publishers. As is the case with most networks, they do not own any traffic; that comes through distribution deals, which in Ingenio’s case includes heavy hitter AOL.
The advertising side works much like a traditional search engine. Advertisers create an ad and enter a maximum price per call. They get charged only $.01 above the next highest bid. Instead of entering a click through URL though, advertisers enter the number to receive the calls. Ingenio creates the telephone equivalent of the redirect in the form of a toll-free number the consumer calls. When calls occur, Ingenio knows who should get charged, how much, and can then split accordingly with the distribution partner.
While Google has experimented with pay per call, it does not appear as though they have implemented a fully-rolled out version. And, luckily for Ingenio, they did the heavy lifting of building up not just an advertiser base but distribution that does not rely on Google. The search giant will certainly push into the space in the near future, as these are clients that do not use the company today. And, while Ingenio has built out an impressive network, they do not currently arbitrage. They do not place their pay per call merchants on Google. Trying to manage that would require developing another solution to get around pay per click, e.g. implementing a version of click to call.
It will be exciting to see how the pay per call market develops. In the end, it means many more advertisers online and more chances for those in direct response to help bring them new customers. Pay per call is a piece of the glue that brings together similar needs from those on opposite ends of the sophistication and scale spectrum. Pay per call brings them online. In the future we’ll see room to aggregate like clients and drive them customers using the leverage and reach in place today. In the meantime, the major engines might simply decide to charge CPM again for local ads to boost numbers and get clients without a site. You can always switch them to another pricing model down the road. I seem to remember that working well for one company.
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