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Brent Turner is executive vice president of call advertising products with Marchex. He joined Marchex in October 2009 and is responsible for Marchex's call-based products. Prior to joining Marchex, he was General Manager of Search and Media Network for Microsoft. Mr. Turner joined Microsoft in 2007 through the acquisition of aQuantive, where he held numerous roles over eight years, including Vice President of Operations for Avenue A (Razorfish), Founder and Vice President of Atlas' Publisher division, and Founder and Vice President of aQuantive's Vertical Networks product group. Mr. Turner received a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Memphis and an MBA from Vanderbilt University.

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Anatomy of Pay-For-Call

Written on
Jun 7, 2010 
Author
Brent Turner  |
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Anatomy of Pay-For-Call

anatomy_smallADOTAS – Ready to find out why some advertisers have moved up to 25% of their search budget into pay-for-call? Looking for an alternative to search per-click bidding and online lead generation?

Advertising veterans often say that if you’re not spending at least 15% of your marketing budget testing new channels, you’re in trouble. If you agree, you should strongly consider testing your next 15% on a pay-for-call campaign. There’s a great chance you’ll end up raising that budget quickly. That’s why pay-for-call models are exploding.

Pay-for-call has indeed arrived, and you owe it to yourself to give it a shot. The goal of this article is to explain how pay-for-call works, so that you’ll know what to expect.

Getting started

To start a pay-for-call test, an advertiser simply agrees to:

A price per call. Per-call prices typically range from $15 to $50, depending on advertiser category. Some advertisers in industries including insurance, professional and home services actually find that they pay the same rate per call as they do for Search clicks. With conversion rates for calls being three to four times that of Search, pay-for-call is a steal.

A billable call window. Because advertisers don’t want to pay for hang-ups and wrong numbers, most pay-for-call businesses bill only for calls that are longer than 30 seconds, for example. But that window — like all advertising terms — is negotiable.

A repeat caller window. Because advertisers also don’t like paying for repeat calls from the same person, most pay-for-call businesses might bill only once for the same caller within so many days. However, billable call windows longer than a week are fairly rare.

Destination numbers. National advertisers can have calls routed to their vanity numbers, while regional businesses can route calls to any one of multiple local numbers. The amount of flexibility in call-routing that reputable pay-for-call companies offer has evolved, given the age of the industry.

After these four decisions, the advertiser is ready to go, and it’s time for the pay-for-call company’s media team to get started.

Driving calls

The pay-for-call media team specifies phone numbers — both toll-free and local — to track which calls are coming from which media sources. The team places these numbers within mobile, online, ad-supported directory assistance and, in some cases, offline channels. Here, the media team literally risks its own dollars to purchase the media.

At this point, let’s say that a consumer is surfing a mobile application and notices an ad for satellite television. When the consumer initiates a call, the call routes through a sophisticated tracking system, which attributes the call to the mobile campaign that drove it.

The customer then reaches the advertiser’s call center at the appropriate destination number. The advertiser may elect to have our sophisticated systems record the call. Our media team will ensure the quality of its media sources. If the call lasts beyond the billable call window and is not a repeat, the advertiser pays. If not, the call is free.

The Phone Beckons

Pay-for-call models are exciting for a number of reasons. First, some advertisers can drive much higher call volume from a higher quality audience than they would expect. At Marchex, we drive tens of thousands of calls per month for some advertisers.

Second, as a performance-based product, pay-for-call offers a less risky way to participate in mobile advertising, reaching an audience in a new way without a significant investment.

Third, pay-for-call offers huge return on investment. Some of our advertisers have replaced up to 25% of their search budget with us within six months after an initial test because of the efficiency.

This month, take your 15% and place it on pay-for-call. You won’t be disappointed.





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