April 16, 2005

AOL now offering Pay Per Call Ads in the US

There's been lots of speculation about pay per call; now you can test it yourself by signing up for an advert on AOL's new local search service. More info on pay per call overall in this SEW article.

There's a piece specifically on AOL here on Red Herring with quotes from Greg Sterling at the Kelsey Group.

AOL pay per call advertising is powered by Ingenio, who are building a pay per call network - info here.

CitySearch already offer pay per call advertising - sign up information here.

Once you've tested pay per call, please let us know your findings - post a comment or contact me by email via the site.

Posted by duncan at 04:07 PM | Comments (0)

March 13, 2005

VOIP and Pay Per Call

AOL already offers VOIP PC to PC "phone calls" between it's users in the UK, and competitor Wanadaoo also offers this. BT are too in the UK.

Now AOL US will start offering calls to landlines via VOIP - and allow users to connect their existing phone handsets up via their broadband connections (now more scrambling around trying to find the PC microphone).

This has long term implications for pay per call and local search - the easier it is to dial out / receive a call on your PC after clicking on a pay per call listing, the more likely the general public are to accept pay per call as an easy to use, quick way to ask businesses (local or otherwise) questions and place orders.

AOL has already partnered with Ingenio to offer pay per call advertising, so hopefully they are working on joining up the pieces.

Posted by duncan at 06:50 PM | Comments (0)

February 08, 2005

FindWhat appoints head of Pay Per Call

FindWhat have appointed a Senior Vice President/General Manager of their pay per call technology. Michael Kerans joins with a background in distribution and ad sales. Full release.

Pay per call is a crucial element of an effective local search advertising solution IMO, allowing advertisers without a website to reach customers looking online for their products/services (with pay per call searchers can request a call from the business or call them directly from their PC).

Businesses with telephone enquiry/sales lines can use this form of advertising to gain more targetted calls via the web, too.

For consumers this should mean empowerment - getting the sales people to call you at a convenient time on their phone bill and getting the information you need to make a decision verbally. This also provides the opportunity to discuss the product/service - something that is not always easy to do via email or online chat. Of course, you might have to put up with the hard sell, too.

More on FindWhat's pay per call technology (press release) - Findwhat.com Launches Pioneering Advertising Service - Pay-Per-Call

Posted by duncan at 01:33 PM | Comments (0)