5 Steps for Advertisers to Get Started with Pay Per Call Marketing

Pay Per Call marketing has been around for a long time, however it’s recently begun to boom and the industry is growing. As this happens many new advertisers are jumping in to Pay Per Call advertising to capitalize on the opportunity. This is causing many advertisers to get started, without being fully prepared for Pay Per Call and how it will work.

Below are 5 steps that advertisers can follow to take full advantage of the Pay Per Call boom, while avoiding a few bumps in the road.

Determine Your Conversion

Before starting with Pay Per Call marketing, advertisers need to determine what will be considered a conversion. What is the value of one phone call? To determine the value of a call an advertiser will need to review how many calls they receive in order to make a sale or a conversion. Then figure out how much one call is worth. The second part of the conversion is to consider what is a reasonable duration for a conversion. What length of call will determine that a call is a qualified call for the advertiser. Advertisers will need to consider that publishers expect around a 1-3 minute duration and campaigns with durations longer than that will be less appealing. Determining a conversion value and duration will require the advertiser to make some assumptions and it’s not possible to know exactly what payout or time will work best. Testing is all part of the process.

Set Up Your Call Treatment

Before callers arrive at the advertiser call center they should already be qualified or disqualified via the call treatment, also know as an Interactive Voice Response (IVR). The IVR will ask questions that the caller can answer with key presses. Only the most qualified callers should then be passed through to the call center. The IVR does not guarantee that only qualified callers will make it through, but it does help to filter. We recommend that the IVR asks the most important qualifying questions first. The IVR can then forward callers to the correct number or call center, but in some cases the call is ended with a pleasant message in order to best filter which callers make it to the call center agent.

Prepare Your Call Center

An advertiser’s call treatment will help filter calls, but the advertiser call center should also be prepared for the Pay Per Call campaign when it starts. Advertisers should direct calls to a section of their call center that is specifically prepared handle these calls, since the behavior of the callers is quite different. Since advertisers will be paying based on the duration of the call, the call center should be trained to identify unqualified callers and get them off the line before the call duration elapses. The call center will also need to provide a unique phone number in order to identify the source of the calls coming in and in some occasions we recommend multiple numbers for multiple traffic sources, for deeper statistical analysis.

Read More: 3 Ways to Succeed with Pay Per Call

Select Promotion Types

Pay Per Call publishers will utilize a number of various promotion methods, from mobile search and display to radio, TV and print. An advertiser needs to determine what type of promotion methods they will allow on their campaigns. Mobile search and display is a large source of Pay Per Call traffic, so this promotion is a must, for sure. Advertisers will likely want to avoid incentive, coreg, and SMS to begin. Incentive and coreg traffic generally drives lower quality calls and SMS is under going some regulation changes, so we recommend holding off for now. Many offline methods can provide some great callers, but some publishers will like to promote the campaign via call center traffic. With call center promotions it is recommended that advertisers provide publishers will approved and disapproved guidelines.

Set Realistic Expectations

Pay Per Call marketing is a very effective promotion method and advertisers are very happy with the calls they receive, but it’s not instant success. Advertisers should have realistic expectations before getting started. When a new campaign goes live it takes time for publishers to review and set up their campaign. Once an advertiser has received a decent amount of calls they should review the calls they received and determine what may need to change or be refined about the campaign. It’s also recommended that advertisers set a budget on their campaign, budgets can be set up for calls or dollar amounts and for daily, weekly or monthly time periods. An advertiser should also know that unfortunately we don’t have a volume button that can simply be turned up or down to drive more or less calls. We do work very hard to drive as many good quality calls as we can, but it’s not an on/off button.

Bonus: Sell Your Campaign to Publishers

With Pay Per Call marketing, and with many performance based marketing campaigns, an advertiser should be prepared to “sell” their campaign to publishers. This means a campaign should be as appealing as possible to publishers and an advertiser needs to consider the following:

  • Regions – How many regions does the campaign cover? The more broad, national or statewide, the more appealing.
  • Hours – Publishers want to be able to run campaigns 24/7, but they also want to run the campaign at optimal conversion times.
  • Payout – The higher the payout, the better. Publisher like high payouts, but high conversion is very important too!
  • Duration – Most campaigns range from 1 to 3 minutes and offers beyond this duration don’t get much consideration.
  • Promotion – At a minimum advertisers should allow for search and display. If you have keyword restrictions, publishers can and will follow them.
  • Bonuses – Make your campaign more appealing by offering a bonus for longer calls or an extra payout for a paid call amount.

Read More: 3 Ways to Succeed with Pay Per Call