There’s a lot of hype out there about Pay-Per-Call, where instead of clicking on a link in search results, customers can pick up the phone and call you. According to MarketingSherpa the reality doesn’t exactly match that hype.

MarketingSherpa reader Mike Merten is running a national ad campaign for Internet marketing services. He is using the Verizon Superpages PPC system, cleverly called Pay Per Calls. Someone probably got paid a hundred grand to come up with that name, too.

So…. Verizon applies a dedicated toll-free or local telephone number to each ad. The number rings through to the advertiser’s regular phone line. Advertisers pay from $2 to $6 per qualified call, depending on the business category.

I guess the idea here is that people who don’t have web sites can still particpate in Internet marketing campaigns by having people who see their ad online call them on the phone.

So, Ed, how’s it working? I’d have to honestly say that about 80% of the calls I get are telemarketers — often several calls the same day from different people within a company working on the same campaign.

[Chuckle]

My own personal joke is that I now know what new telemarketing campaigns are kicking off nationally — I just go by the nine or ten calls I get from the same company (different representatives). I think that when people had to use print directories to do telemarketing, they at least had a sheet that they could cross out names on. Not so with the online generation I guess.

[Chortle]

Out of the 15% to 20% or so calls that are “good,” I’ve yet to pull a conversion. It’s the case of finding the right customer with the right budget; and of course there’s always plenty of competition.

[Guffaw]

Some other very interesting insights from Ed:

(1.) You have 15 seconds in which to decide if somebody’s a telemarketer or not. If they don’t come right out and say it (or if they have a strong foreign accident, kind of roll out the words or plain simply deny it’s a sales call), you’ll go over the threshold and get charged ($12.70 a call in my case) [Uh, what happened to $2 to $6 a call? - Matt]. The problem with this is that you might erroneously blow a good call, which actually happened to me (the guy called back).

(2) Expect to deal with representatives from the same company calling you thinking that maybe they’re the first one to do so. One mouth doesn’t know who the 10 others are calling, etc. and the telemarketing campaign may be national.

(3) Expect to have to take good notes, because you may get five to six calls in a day’s time.

(4) Expect to have to review your weekly/monthly record of calls, determine all the calls that are baloney, and then have to talk to Verizon’s people possibly several times to get things straight. Even then they’ll only give you a break if the calls hover around their 15 second threshold.

I thought this was a dumb idea when I heard it the first time, but who knows?

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This entry was posted on Friday, April 14th, 2006 at 10:26 pm.
Filed under Affiliate Marketing.
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