Pay-per-Call: a brief outline

Pay-per-Call: brief outline and some Do's & Dont's   First off let's get our terminology straight: Pay-per-call: this means you advertise your phone number on the Internet and pay when a prospect calls you up. A rough price guideline here is 10x an average click price of what it would cost you in AdWords, i.e.: if you pay $1 for an AdWords click, expect to pay $10 per call

Pay-per-Call: brief outline and some Do's & Dont's

First off let's get our terminology straight:

Pay-per-call: this means you advertise your phone number on the Internet and pay when a prospect calls you up. A rough price guideline here is 10x an average click price of what it would cost you in AdWords, i.e.: if you pay $1 for an AdWords click, expect to pay $10 per call. Of course people that do pick up the phone are quite a lot more likely to actually buy and be fully qualified leads

Easy right?

So what's click-per-call:

Click-per-call, is very similar to Pay-per-call but the difference is that by using the new advanced mobile phones and iPhone people don't even need to dial a number - they only need to click on their screen, like the picture here below:

Pay-per-Call on the other hand doesn't require you to have a website.

   HOWEVER: lately these terms have been used interchangeably and the definitions have become confused. The fact remains there are two separate media here: online and teleohone exchange. So to keep it simple: Pay-per-call means you pay when someone calls you.

So why the two?

From a marketing and lead generation perspective the difference lies in the tracking and staticising.

Basically the first system (pay-per-call: you advertise your phone number and someone dials the numbers) has usually a special number like 1-800. This number goes through an exchange and then redirects the call to your business. Doing it this way you can:

a) have an attractive, memorable number

and more importantly, long term

b) you can track and staticise the amount of times the number was called. You could create a unique number for an offer that you are split-testing, run the campaign and tally up the calls.

With click-per-call, it's all state-of-the-art AdWords technology.

There is no need for a unique number that goes through a special exchange. It's all online anyway and the person just clicks. For you the business owner it means you can still see which AdWords ad, keyword, location, etc attracts the right type of caller.

Good for some businesses, not for others...

Online click-per-call is good for some businesses, not so for others. My mother for instance would never be reached by this media because she neither owns an advanced mobile nor does she buy online. And there is a LARGE section of the population that you miss if you are only marketing on the web or via "smart-phones".

But back to the Do's & Dont's

Do:

in the US, the large Pay-per-call giants are Ingenio (now part of AT&T) and of course, Google.
If you have a considerable Pay-per-call budget then do find out when their financial quarter ends and call your account manager just before. Haggle man, haggle! Account managers may not be able to lower prices, but they can offer you more delivered ad showings for cold hard cash. (it may be high tech, but at the end of the day it's all just business...)

Don't:

Just leave it to "the experts". Learn, read and ask questions. A lot of the account managers I speak to just about know the technology enough to talk the talk.

Just because it's high-tech doesn't mean you should feel intimidated or shy :)

Below is the At&T ad for their pay-per-call service. Click on the numbers for a step-by-step demo