What is Pay-Per-Call Advertising?
In performance marketing, we operate under the premise that if we can track it, we can optimize it and we can ultimately make more money. When it comes to tracking, tracking the sale and what drove the sale is key. Essentially, consumers make purchases via three different channels: online, in person or via the phone. For years, marketers have been highly successful at optimizing the online channel. Clicks are pretty easy to track on a CPA basis. In store purchases are a little harder to track in terms of the campaign that drove the sale, though there are many mobile applications that are looking to change that. Tracking phone calls has been historically a little bit more tricky to accomplish. Direct-to-consumer marketers using TV, Radio and print have used call tracking for years to see how ads are performing, but the technology hasn't made it easy to understand real results on a CPA basis for these media types. For online marketers, tracking phone sales back to online campaign spend has been nearly impossible and in the affiliate channel even created a point of friction between Advertisers and Publishers.
"Leakage" is a term used in the affiliate channel to refer to sales that occur via the phone but were ultimately driven by a publishers promotional efforts. When a consumer picked up the phone to complete a purchase, get a quote for insurance or so forth, the publisher driving that call via a banner ad, search campaign or other promotional method would not get credit for the sale. This has become such a prevalent issue between advertisers and publishers, that in many cases, advertisers end up removing or demoting the display of their phone number at the request of their publisher partners.
While this reduces the problem associated with leakage, unfortunately it creates a bigger problem. Customer satisfaction. A recent poll by Harris Interactive found that 54% of consumers want human interaction before making big-ticket purchases, 77% want more live assistance when making online purchases and 53% abandon their shopping cards due to lack of human interaction.
Removing phone numbers or making them hard to find creates a poor consumer experience.
So how do we solve that problem and create a win-win for advertisers and publishers?
Pay-Per-Call. Here's how it works for Advertisers:
With RingRevenue's Pay-Per-Call platform, advertisers have the ability to create call-based campaigns just like they would click based campaigns. Advertisers set the targeting, call quality and payout criteria. Publishers apply to promote those campaigns using unique phone numbers and get credit for sending qualified calls through to the advertiser.
And because phone numbers are ubiquitous and easy to track, promotions can be run anywhere. Not just online. Publishers can take advantage of new promotional methods and media types, while advertisers benefit from increased distribution. See what I mean about a win-win? And by the way, both advertisers and publishers benefit from the fact that phone sales typically convert at 30-50%, compared that to clicks at 1-3% and carry an average order value of 1.5-2 times online orders. Who wouldn't want more phone calls?
