Pay Per Call Research in the UK
Pay per call is seen by some as the natural successor to pay per click, where phone numbers are displayed on search results and content pages instead of web links. The advertiser pays per call instead of per click. But how is it being used in the UK, what is the potential and what are the pitfalls?
Pay per call was officially announced by Miva in the UK back in September 2005. However, the product wasn’t ready to go for a while after that. Receptional has been running test campaigns and at the moment there is not a good take up, either by the web publishers nor, more importantly, by the web users. Either here was some fundamentally flawed research into the business model or it just hasn’t caught on yet. I think it is a little of both.
Our largest trial has been in the travel arena. We advertised competitively priced short breaks from the UK outbound to Western Europe, through a mid sized brand. The campaign was not without its backing. We bid top price in five travel categories (there were only 8 to choose from, so we are pretty well dominating travel). We asked for the campaign to go national throughout the UK and we aimed to leverage the advert by using the brand and only having the adverts showing at the times of day when the call centre was open (8:30AM to 8:30 PM). You would think this is a fairly significant campaign in terms of spend. Sadly, we are currently generating a call a day of varying quality. It may take a while at this rate to spend the cash…Not that the product is without potential. I just believe the distribution network to be an incorrect mix at this point. People are not ready to jump from web to phone. However, if these adverts were appearing on PDAs, in signature lines in targeted text messages and maybe on interactive TV or even offline, then these are places where a phone is handier than an internet connection. I want my phone number appearing on GPS systems, offering discount prices on the hotel at the end of the journey, or on the printout of my journey directions from theaa.com or Google Maps. So far – there is little evidence of this.
Miva have now just announced integration with Kelkoo and with Yahoo, though as yet I haven’t seen a Yahoo page with my advert on it. Are these the best partners for this technology? Possibly, but I’d rather they were with Skype, putting my advert up every time someone made a call from the UK to France. Now THEN I’d be targeted, and with a press of a button, the user is following up his call to France with a call to the travel agency to book the ferry and hotel.
Our research is not suggesting that reach is the root cause of the problem. The minimum bid price is £2.00 (About US$3.30) which is fine. You would expect call rates to only be a fraction of click through rates for banner adverts, but with 10,000 ad impressions per call, the business model currently appears flawed.
I believe the technology has merit, however. For this reason, Receptional have devised a way to track and – if necessary – record all calls derived from pay per call independently of any pay per call provider that might have you believe their own stats. This web based system can set anyone up instantly worldwide, providing the person doing the dialing is UK based. If fraud starts creeping into this system, we’ll be way ahead of the pack in combatting it. If you would like your Pay Per Call campaign not only professionally managed, but also professionally tracked all the way into your call centre please contact us
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19.02.2006.
