Pay Per Call Advertising- Ordinary or Extraordinary?

Pay Per Call Advertising is expected to grow to 3.7 billion by 2010. Over half of which is expected to be driven by marketing agencies such as ours. Are these numbers good? Have you embraced pay per call advertising yet?

Pay per call advertising, unlike pay per click advertising’s model, is based on actual calls of people interested in your services after reading your ad. Not a bad deal considering most of us would agree that we would rather have a phone call rather than a web inquiry. In addition, most of us are also willing to pay more for this service as well. So why isn’t everyone doing it?

The main problem I have is that of distribution. How much focus am I going to give pay per call if I can barely spend $200 a month in calls? I don’t know about you, but my stakeholders need more results than that! Off to the side of the plate it goes…

Is this merely that agencies aren’t embracing pay per call or is it a logistical issue? Lets face it, if it were the best thing since sliced bread…all the agencies would be on board. But given the limited distribution, overall acceptance has been hindered. Ingenio, one of the webs largest pay per call advertising network claims it distributes advertises in AOL and Miva. Big deal. That’s merely a small faction of a huge market. Moreover, most pay per call models are based for local advertisers, so the pie even gets smaller.

Ok, enough pay per call bashing. Yes, provided that it yields an attractive ROI, I am not saying you should ignore it. However, if you’re midst of formulating your online strategy, I suggest that you weight pay per call’s reach before you jump in with both feet and push other online media aside.
[tags] pay per call, ingenio, search engine advertising [/tags]