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SoHo NEWS & TIPS
Helping You Make the Most of Your Small Office/Home Office
SoHoTIPS.com
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Greetings,
For small businesses that don't receive as much advertising
and internet clicks, the pay-per-call method is probably more
practical than pay-for-clicks. Small businesses rely heavily
on the phone to generate business this could be a beneficial
marketing tool. The article below discusses how this method
works, and how to get started.
Best,
Mandi
P.S. You can discuss this issue or any other topic in the
new SoHo News & Tips forum. Check it out here...
SoHo News & Tips Forum
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Pay-Per-Call Marketing Tool
So-called pay-per-call advertising is far from reaching the
ubiquity of "pay per click." But for the legions of small and
local merchants that rely more on the telephone than the Web
for business, buying calls instead of clicks makes more sense.
Like all performance-based advertising, businesses only pay
when they reap results from their ads -- in this case when
someone calls the number listed in their pay-per-call ad. Over
the past two years, several companies including Ingenio,
Citysearch, and Verizon, have introduced pay-per-call ad
services that circulate their ads on various Web sites' paid
search results, often alongside pay-per-click ads.
Here's how it usually works: A business signs up with a
service that designs it an Internet ad that lists some inform-
ation about the business and a unique number used to track and
bill for calls generated from the ad. The ad appears in paid
search results on whatever Web sites the provider distributes
them on with when consumers search for such a business in its
geographic area. The advertiser pays a fee -- ranging anywhere
from $2 to $50 -- when someone calls the number listed in the
ad. The average call fee is about $8 to $10.
Each service operates a little differently, however. Ingenio,
for instance, hosts an online auction where businesses bid on
their per-call fee to jockey for better placement in search
results. The highest bidder pays a penny more than the next-
highest bidder in their business category and geographic area.
Others charge flat fee per call depending on the business type.
But pay-per-call ads are just now gaining traction, as more
search providers use them. Ingenio, which distributes its ads
on AOL.com and a few other search engines, recently announced
a deal with Microsoft Corp.'s MSN unit to place ads on its
search service for wireless devices. Kelsey Group, a Princeton,
N.J. market-research firm, estimates that pay-per-call
advertising will reach 15% of all local search advertising by
2010, up from about 2% today.
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cont'd...
A big reason pay-per-call hasn't been widely used so far is
that the largest search behemoths like Google and Yahoo have
yet to deploy it. Yahoo has tested pay-per-call ads and Google
recently announced plans to retest a similar feature early
next year called click-to-call advertising, where consumers
type their phone number into a designated box on the ad and
the call is automatically connected.
But despite the narrower exposure, there's little risk to
testing out a pay-per-call service.
Call ads can be particularly beneficial to local merchants
that operate solely in their geographic area depending
primarily on the telephone to conduct business, says Greg
Sterling, an Oakland, Calif. Internet marketing analyst. Not
to mention that an estimated half of all small businesses
don't even have a Web site, so pay-per-click ads are
impractical. And even those that do have a Web site aren't
adept at converting clicks into actual business.
Typically a business will pay 10 times more for a call than a
click. But callers are generally more serious shoppers than
those who just click on ads, says Matt Booth, a senior vice
president of the Kelsey Group. A caller will convert to a
paying customer roughly half the time, whereas "it takes about
10 clicks to a site to generate one phone call," Booth says.
Another advantage: "Click fraud," or the problem of people
clicking on pay-per-click ads without the intent to possibly
buy something, isn't an issue with call ads.
Though some businesses do worry they will rack up high fees
from irrelevant or prank calls, most pay-per-call services try
to dodge such concerns by not charging for a call until after
it's been connected for a certain duration, such as 15 seconds.
Moreover, businesses have to make sure previous customers who
first contacted them through the pay-per-call number call them
back on their regular number so they don't end up needlessly
paying for calls.
startupjournal.com
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DID YOU KNOW?
Why start from scratch? Why not look at how your competitors
sell their offerings to get some instead about what has been
tried before and what has worked well for existing companies?
Do they have retail storefronts, or do they sell through a
distribution channel to many retail outlets? What distributors
already carry your competitors' products? Ask the retailers;
they will tell you who they buy from and their alternate
sources.
So what did you think about this issue? Drop me a line and let
me know at mailto:mandi@gophercentral.com
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