Telmetrics: Prevent PPCall Spam

Call tracking and PPCall firm Telmetrics put out a release that indicated telemarketers are calling business lines (published on the Internet) more often partly because of the consumer “do not call” registry:

Telmetrics’ call analysis showed a 61 percent increase in telemarketer activity from January-February 2009 when compared to January-February 2010.

I’m guessing that telemarketers are scraping the Web as well as probably using traditional media (phone books) to build lists that they’re now using to spam businesses with telemarketing calls. That inevitably means some numbers participating in call/leads-based ad programs (call-tracking/PPCall) are getting these calls. In fact Telmetrics says that “up to 40 percent of all call volume” could be coming from telemarketers. Yikes.

To address such “call quality” issues, Telmetrics released some best practices advice:

• Local advertisers, including national brands with a local presence, should use local phone numbers in ad campaigns rather than toll-free lines. Consumers are four times more likely to call an advertiser with a local phone number.
• Apply a quarantine period to all phone numbers published as a pay per call line, so that advertisers do not receive calls from legacy owners.
• Use an automated tool to filter and block invalid calls so that advertisers receive real and valid leads and aren’t bothered by nuisance calls. Automation is more efficient and accurate than report filtering and significantly reduces administration and customer service costs.
• Once a phone number is used in an ad campaign, continue ongoing quality assurance testing.

As an aside about the above, Telmetrics says “Consumers are four times more likely to call an advertiser with a local phone number.” I’m going out on a limb here but I would argue this data is also a proxy for the general effectiveness of local ads vs. national ads in many categories.

Back to calls. The problem that Telmetrics is raising is a fundamental one and threatens the integrity of PPCall programs. Yext uses an algorithm to only bill for calls it deems valid leads. Telmetrics has a “auto-blocking” system that it says prevents most telemarketers from getting through on these numbers.

Has anyone out there used PPCall and found that a large percentage of calls are telemarketing oriented?

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Guess: Phone #s in AdWords = PPCall

Google, to my knowledge, has always allowed phone numbers to appear in AdWords ad copy. But this has not been a widely employed practice. Or maybe at one point it was allowed and then later disallowed; I’m not sure.

However last week over at Search Engine Land we were sent a screen shot that showed phone numbers in AdWords:

Google’s mobile new Click-to-Call (which translates into PPCall when you turn off the PC targeting) is widely known. But this phone-numbers-in-AdWords development seemed to be new. Indeed, Google confirmed it:

“We’re currently testing a feature with a small number of advertisers in which a phone number can be included within the ad to help them more effectively engage with customers who prefer to connect over the phone.”

However Google wouldn’t say anything more about:

• Whether these were tracking numbers (provided by Google)
• Whether Google was getting paid on a per-call basis

I’m going to speculate that these are tracking numbers (from Google) and that it is a PPCall billing model. The logic behind my speculation is simple.

If people see the ads and just call the phone number there’s no click and so no billable event. Google doesn’t get paid. And the presence of the phone number in the ad in fact explicitly contemplates that some number of people will just pick up the phone and not click.

To determine the efficacy of this program calls would necessarily need to be tracked with unique phone numbers. And Google probably wouldn’t say: just go ahead advertiser and use your own phone numbers and let us know later how many calls you receive. So Google is probably supplying the tracking numbers; and the model is probably PPCall.

Agree? Disagree? What do you think is going on?

Google’s Click to Call into PPCall?

Telmetrics’ Bill Dinan offers a column at Search Engine Land and thoughts on Google’s mobile Click to Call offering. He wonders:

Will national advertisers flock to the Google click-to-call model in droves and effectively out price many local advertisers? Will Google use the click pricing temporarily while it builds critical mass?

At the recent CTIA show in Las Vegas I fortuitously ran into Google’s Chris La Sala (now in mobile) and a colleague while waiting for a cab. I opportunistically asked about click to call and pricing. I’ve always said “It’s a call for the price of a click.” What I didn’t realize is that Google will allow marketers to totally opt-out of online targeting.

The above image is a screenshot from the AdWords dashboard. Advertisers can “uncheck” the “desktop and laptop computers” box and, viola, mobile-only targeting. As more advertisers realize this and embrace “Click to Call” it may become “Pay per Call” with prices rising accordingly. This is what Google would like to see as well.

There was a brief mention of Click to Call by Product Management VP Susan Wojcicki on the recent Google Q1 earnings call:

We also rolled out new formats and targeting options specific for mobile. This quarter we launched a Click to Call feature that automatically puts the phone number in the ad that is running on a Smart Phone. So if you are looking for auto insurance and do that query from your Android or iPhone the ads will include a number to call. Not surprisingly this has increased click through, or should I say call through.

Last year comScore and TMPDM reported that 46% of users who conducted a successful local business search online went on to contact that business via telephone.

Telmetrics: Google Click2Call Good for Industry

The following is a piece by Bill Dinan, President of Telmetrics, about Google’s recent expansion of its Click to Call mobile advertising program and its potential larger significance in the market. The opinions are solely those of the author . . .

While search monetization for Google has always been about clicks and measuring online activity, this move validates the complementary relationship between online search and offline consumer purchasing behavior.  Online drives offline, so clicks and calls go hand in hand. Add mobile to the equation and Google recognizes a revenue opportunity in tracking the connection between mobile searching and the resulting calls. Advertisers benefit because they get a more complete view of the response generated by a mobile advertising program.

But Google’s approach is different–other providers’ monetization models price calls separately and typically higher than clicks. You have to wonder why Google has come out with a lower price for calls, when industry experience demonstrates calls can be monetized at higher levels than clicks. Our guess is that they wanted to keep the mobile model simple for advertisers that are already comfortable with paying for clicks while still developing a revenue stream that accounts for the offline connection.

Does Google’s move into click-to-call hurt other online properties offering pay per call solutions?

No, because Google’s move is consistent with their click-based model. Google’s model is not pay per call – it is a complementary model on the mobile device but it is still pay per click. Click-to-call doesn’t automatically translate to pay per call.  However, Google’s move reinforces the need to track consumer online-offline searching and buying patterns.

Have national advertisers showed interest in mobile click-to-call or pay per call ads?

National advertisers have showed interest in mobile advertising, but more importantly they are looking for more transparency and performance-based advertising across all traditional and digital mediums to validate their ad spend.

Click-to-call provides similar data to a click-based model and those advertisers already used to pay-per-click via Google will find that click-to-call is a natural extension and complementary. Those advertisers already using call-based metrics either through pay per call or subscription programs will still be looking for true call response data which by virtue of the information attached to calls provides richer data about consumer behavior.

Google Debuts Click to Call for Mobile

Today Google is formally launching functionality that enables a “clickable local phone number” to appear in mobile ads.  In other words a phone number appears as part of the ad copy and consumer-users can simply tap the number to initiate a call (see image below). It’s a call for the price of a click on mobile handsets.

Not available on PC AdWords campaigns, it’s only available on “high-end” mobile handsets with full HTML browsers. We wrote about this initially when an email went out to AdWords advertisers notifying them that Google was introducing click to call in mobile ads.

Earlier today I was able to speak at some length with Paul Feng, Google’s Group Product Manager for Mobile Ads. He explained that the functionality is easily activated; it’s really part of AdWords local extensions.

The rest of this post is at SEL.

Call Tracking Controversy?

The emerging conventional wisdom is that call tracking should be uniformly included in search and other online marketing campaigns. However in a column today at Search Engine Land, David Mihm strongly argues that call tracking is not a good idea:

To maximize your rankings on Google Maps, Yahoo Local, and Bing Local, your business’s Name, Address and Phone number (“NAP,” to borrow a Localeze-inspired acronym) should broadcast the same rock-solid signal on every platform.  Think of them as your business’s thumbprint.  As Gib Olander of Localeze  says, they are “not the place for advertising.”

Remember, as Brownbook’s Marc Lyne pointed out, that “you don’t own your business information.” For instance, what happens if you give your business a unique tracking phone number at a directory that Acxiom happens to spider for its own index? That number is now considered authoritative by Acxiom, and gets pushed out to every partner that’s leasing Acxiom’s data. Meanwhile, infoUSA and Localeze probably still have your main line. You now have two different thumbprints.

In a perfect world, Google, Yahoo, and Bing would be smart enough to see that the business name and address information matches, even though the phone numbers differ. They’d “count” all of them as citations for the same business, but continue to display the Local number you’ve given them in the Local Business Center. But given some of the issues with Google’s merging algorithm, do you really want to take that chance?

I’m not an SEO expert so I’m not able to dispute or speak to these issues. I wonder if anyone wants to read what David has said and comment or address his points?

MSFT Integrating CPA into Search

Microsoft is going to make an announcement later this morning about product search and a new “cashback” program. (It’s being called “bribery;” it’s not.) I’m sworn to uphold the embargo, but others have either learned about it or broken the embargo and written about it. Here’s my post on SEL.

Among the several interesting things about the new program is the integration of a CPA model in search. Last year at the SMX Local-Mobile conference I asked the question whether CPA was the “ultimate local ad model.” The answer the panelists gave was “no.” They thought a range of models would continue to exist for local.

Lead-gen for local businesses has been around for a long long time (Cars, Real Estate) but it’s had limited success and has a very mixed reputation. It’s being revived by sites such as Matchpoint, among others (such as GenBook, Booking Angel). And Caliber Data is trying to extend this to the point of sale with a loyalty card.

What do people think about CPA models penetrating or gaining more traction in local? (PPCall is a form of CPA).

Online Booking for SMBs and CPA

Bob Tedeschi’s NY Times column today examines online booking/calendaring and three sites that are competing in more or less the same segment: Hourtown, Booking Angel and GenBook.

GenBook appears farthest along with business development and Hourtown is using a subscription model rather than CPA/PPBooking, which the other two favor. OpenTable and online hotel reservations before it have proven these systems will work.

It’s a very interesting segment that has value to bring to publishers and SMBs. It’s also not without challenges — not the least of which is how the sales channel partners position these products beside clicks, calls, placement, etc.  There’s also some potential consumer behavior issues, which might vary by industry segment.

ZocDoc is addressing potential consumer hesitation to book unknown doctors and dentists online by building a Yelp-like directory site around the booking functionality.

Don’t have time to say much more . . . off to CTIA.

Offline Conversion Tracking

Christine Churchill writes a good piece about offline conversion tracking today on Search Engine Land. This is the key in opening many people’s eyes to the power of local. Local is really about where the money changes hands. It doesn’t happen online.

The Internet is a marketing platform that influences purchase decisions that happen — not online — but in the physical world (read: local). Yet offline conversion tracking is an immature business with calls, coupons and surveys being among the only mechanisms available.

Only coupons truly reflect offline conversions; other methodologies are about self reporting or proxy behavior (clicking on maps, send to phone, calls). Some folks (i.e., AOL and Caliber data) are working on loyalty card POS tie ins that will enable tracking down to the register.

But mobile also represents an interesting bridge between the online and offline worlds that will create more visibility over time on the Internet’s impact on offline purchase behavior.

Superpages Video Launch Update

I just got off the phone with Eric Chandler and Robyn Rose, president and VP of marketing for Superpages respectively. As usual they were extremely candid and forthcoming, which I really appreciate.

Chandler explained that Superpages actually had introduced video ads on its site “four or five years ago, but we were way too early.” Now the timing is right and advertiser demand is growing. Consumer behavior associated with video is also well established. Another report is due out this week from Pew, confirming again the popularity of online video.

Superpages intends to syndicate video to a range of destinations, including, potentially, its current network of PPClick partners. What’s interesting is that Chandler said they were also open to syndicating video to other Internet yellow pages sites.

I was told that Superpages is charging a production fee of “under $1,000” and then a per click/stream fee for each viewing of the video. This is unlike the Citysearch fee structure that bundles video production into an overall ad spend at a certain price threshold.

The per-stream charge will be auction-based, like Superpages’ PPC and “pay for calls” products. There will be a floor and bidding will similarly be category based rather than keyword based.

Chandler said he thought that the value of the videos sat “between clicks and calls,” with calls being the most valuable ad unit. But we also discussed the possibility that ego and the analogy to TV might drive the competition and prices for video up above many categories of calls.

He then told me that in their calls packages the pricing floor for calls had been increased to $10 per call. He said that there were “a la carte” options for calls that still preserved lower per-call bid pricing. I asked about the range of pricing and the response was “anywhere from $2 to over $100” per call.

I also asked about Superpages’ click to call offering, which I had thought disappeared but is somewhat more buried behind phone numbers now. They said that it had “plateaued” after ramping “up to a point.” Google recently discontinued click to call.

Regarding syndication Chandler also discussed the possibility that it would eventually include cable TV in addition to the Internet.

Perhaps most interesting of all was that now, with the various PPClick and calls packages that Superpages is selling, the company is often within “80% to 85%” of print spending on a per advertiser basis. What that means is that if Superpages can successfully spend online advertiser budgets it will be making, in some cases, 80%+ of print on a gross basis. Margins are lower online. Chandler said that while cannibalization had been “minimal” to date, they were seeing more interest from advertisers in online products. Video will only increase that trend.

We also discussed that Superpages traffic and platform “agnosticism” was driven as much by pure economics as the company’s “openness.” If Superpages can drive more quality traffic from whatever source, it can make more revenue. “As bid rates go up you don’t need as many streams, calls or clicks,” added Chandler.

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Related: Superpages does distribution deal with Jingle’s Free411 for pay-for-calls advertisers.

SuperPages Signs Deal with DirectoryM

To syndicate its advertisers out through DirectoryM’s publisher network. From the release:

Idearc Media Corp. and DirectoryM today announced a distribution agreement that allows Idearc to place its Superpages.com® advertisers’ content on the DirectoryM online advertising network. Under this agreement, Superpages.com’s performance-based advertisers will now be available within the DirectoryM directory which is distributed through some of the most highly trafficked sites on the web including Newsweek, PC World, Inc, The Financial Times, and the 42 regional business journals published by American City Business Journals.

Not much to say about this beyond the fact that SuperPages continues to try and aggressively syndicate to build more click and exposure opportunities for its advertisers.

Here’s DirectoryM’s directory on the Newsweek site (below the fold in the left column):

Clicking on the category “architects” and then “California” and then “San Francisco” yields this:

It’s essentially “lead-gen” so it’s interesting to consider how this might be priced vs. PPC (clicks/calls) advertising that SuperPages is otherwise emphasizing. These leads are probably pretty good given that it takes some time and determination to get to this final screen.

Skype Launches Local, Social Search

The Kelsey Group’s Mike Boland posted on this on Friday: Skype, which has yet to prove full value for eBay, has launched version 3.1 that combines local search with social recommendations (and presumably later PPCall):

As part of Skype 3.1 Beta you can now use SkypeFind to recommend your favourite local businesses to your friends and the entire Skype community.

In May last year I argued that Skype could be thought of as a “social network with voice.” While this is one angle on what Skype is doing it’s a very interesting one. Ultimately voice for Skype is just an entry point into a larger play and ad model.

eBay is using Skype to facilitate buyer-seller interaction; and Skype and Google have an “infrastructure” deal that lays the groundwork for a broadening of PPCall on both networks.

Panama to ‘Launch’ in March

Bloomberg is reporting that Panama will officially “launch” in March. However, Yahoo! is migrating search clients now to the new platform so what this means is that the migration will be complete in March.

Yahoo! will likely benefit from more paid-search revenue and increased spending. From the article:

Stuart Larkins, vice president of search at Chicago-based Performics, said spending [on Yahoo!] may rise as much as 45 percent for some clients. He said 15 to 20 of his 200 clients will start using Panama by the end of this week.

But market share affects ad revenue:

Matt Naeger, vice president at Pittsburgh-based Impaqt said clients typically spend about 60 to 70 percent of their budgets on Google, while about 20 to 25 percent goes to Yahoo. Microsoft Corp. typically gets 10 to 15 percent, he said.

Is Mobile the ‘Sweet Spot’ for PPCall?

Ingenio today is announcing a relationship with “white label” mobile search vendor JumpTap:

Ingenio Pay Per Call advertisements appear in response to consumer queries on devices that leverage JumpTap’s carrier-branded offering. Leading carriers, including Alltel, use JumpTap’s mobile search solution to drive revenue while providing a comprehensive mobile search experience for consumers. The Pay Per Call advertiser only pays when a consumer initiates a call to the business from their mobile phone, thus providing measurable advertising-driven results.

Here’s ClickZ’s article on the deal.

JumpTap’s value proposition is that it can offer a complete mobile search and monetization package to carriers to make their mobile search capabilities competitive with branded search engines that are now aggressively moving into the mobile space. Until recently the conventional wisdom had been that US carriers wouldn’t do deals with search engines because they were fearful of becoming merely a “dumb pipe.” However, the recent Microsoft-Sprint alliance calls that assumption into question. AllTell Wireless is JumpTap’s highest visibility partnership. (Medio is a JumpTap competitor.)

For JumpTap, the Ingenio deal offers a ready supply of advertisers. For Ingenio it offers another mobile distribution partner in a growing list. Ingenio also has mobile distribution through Microsoft (via Live.com mobile search and the Sprint relationship.) It also has mobile distribution relationships with AOL, go2, UpSnap and Jingle Network’s 1800 Free411.

Mobile, at least in the near term, is the emerging “sweet spot” for PPCall. There are some challenges with PPCall on the desktop that go mainly to query volume. Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft, which control the bulk of online search traffic – mostly Google and Yahoo! – have yet to adopt PPCall online. Google has implemented “click-to-call” and so has Microsoft. However, these click-to-call offerings are not currently PPCall, although they could support it. Yahoo! has tested PPCall but has yet to implement it online.

Recent research from Nielsen and WebVisible shows that the majority of consumers are inclined to use the phone to contact local businesses they discover online vs other contact methods:

• 68% said they would most likely use the phone number on the website to contact a vendor
• 16% said they would contact a vendor by email
• 11% said they would most likely contact a vendor via an online form
• 6% said they would visit a vendor in-person

Despite this consumer behavior and the promise of PPCall, it hasn’t yet penetrated to where the volume of local search traffic is today online. Ingenio has built an impressive network. However AOL, which controls only about 6% of monthly search traffic — about 390 million queries, with 78 million having a local intent (let’s say) — remains Ingenio’s largest volume distribution partner. (These are obviously meaningful volumes, but not the billions going on over at G and Y!.)

Until PPCall kicks in on Google and Yahoo! the currently circulating forecast numbers are too aggressive. The original forecast The Kelsey Group’s Neal Polachek and I did for PPCall in early ’05 was based on various hypothetical scenarios and assumptions that have yet to come to pass. In other words, everything changes for online PPCall when it is adopted by the engines driving the greatest query volume.

That stands in marked contract to what’s going on in mobile. There, Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft are in various stages of deploying PPCall. Merchant contacts (conversions) in the mobile context are significantly higher, from about 4% to over 20% in some cases. This is based on the fact that there’s less “competition” in a small-screen mobile (or DA) environment, and typically one relevant ad is served. Thus the device, the use case and the contact method (calling the merchant) are all aligned for PPCall in a mobile environment.

Keyword Prices and Brands

SEM firm Fathom Online has been reporting flat (or declining) average keyword prices for the past several quarters. But that doesn’t entirely make sense.

Paid search revenues keep going up, driven in part by an influx of new advertisers. If you have more advertisers and more revenues in search it would suggest more competition over keywords. That’s especially true if you recognize that 75% – 80% of search queries are for “generic” or “category” terms.

And as search becomes recognized as a branding medium (not a pure one but one nonetheless), you also should have large advertisers trying to “own” terms or categories associated with their products. Once the brand budget gets tapped and direct response ROI considerations are thrown out the window, the top slots will all get more expensive and flush out the direct response types — at least in selected high-profile categories.

These dynamics should be driving keyword price increases and inflation, which in turn will drive advertisers to other forms of online marketing. Now keyword prices have apparently jumped. I would expect that to be the new trend.

Here’s eMarketer-compiled data from Fathom and research firm InightExpress:

Recognizing that paid search will eventually become too costly for some traditional SEM advertisers Google is trying to build out other options for them. For example, here’s a quote from eBags.com co-founder Peter Cobb, from a November 6 WSJ article about Google’s recent print newspaper “alpha” test:

Peter Cobb, co-founder of eBags.com, said he is attracted by possibly targeting specific groups of consumers through newspapers and tailoring ads for cities where certain types of bags or luggage are more popular.

At the same time, eBags.com has seen the cost of Web advertising through Google — which is priced via competitive auction — triple or quadruple in some cases amid big increases in online ad spending by rival retailers. “Costs are going up online, efficiencies are decreasing — we’re looking for other opportunities,” Mr. Cobb said.

Search + Display: Two Great Tastes . . .

I’m about to get on a plane, but here’s a Yahoo! release that reflects research on the beneficial combined impact of paid search and display advertising:

The research was based on results from actual advertising campaigns from Fortune 100 companies in several vertical categories. The overall results showed that when viewed together, campaigns that take advantage of both search and display advertising are far more engaging and effective than those viewed individually. Online users who were exposed to both the search and display advertising campaigns increased their share of page views relative to competitive sites by 68 percent, and time spent by 66 percent. More importantly, among those exposed to both the search and display ads, purchases of the advertiser’s products and services increased by 244 percent online and 89 percent offline compared to online users with similar behavior who were not exposed to these ads.

Office Live Gets a Thumbs Up

I have several friends, in addition to myself, who are now operating small businesses. It’s very interesting to compare our challenges and see where they intersect — mostly around time shortages.

I just got some “comps” (in pdf) from one of those friends who’s trying to set up a site for his accupuncture and alternative medicine practice. Previously I laid out a long laundry list for him of all the free SME marketing opportunities online.

The design comps he showed me were terrible and my friend was complaining about how much time the process was taking. I had told him about my own aborted experience and we commiserated.

On a related note, I came across a rather long piece by the NY Times’ David Pogue who gives a thorough review of the website building tools and related applications on Microsoft’s Office Live product. He has several minor criticisms but on the whole is very bullish on the product:

It’s a sweet suite (Internet Explorer for Windows required) that every small-business owner should investigate — quick, before somebody else snaps up the dot-com name you want.

The free Web site is the crown jewel, but there’s more to it than that. The free plan, known as Office Live Basics, also offers you 25 matching e-mail accounts (sales@caseycorp, litigation@caseycorp, and so on). You get a password-protected online calendar, too, and even free tech support by e-mail.

The Basics plan shakes up the status quo in another way, too, thanks to a free service called AdManager, now in beta testing. It lets even novices get into search-engine advertising — you know, so that your ads pop up when people use Google or Yahoo to search for something.

AdManager lets you specify a budget, say $100 a month, and walks you through deciding which search terms (keywords) will bring up your ad. At the moment, you can place ads only on Microsoft’s own search sites, MSN Search and Live.com. Microsoft says, however, that it is working with Google, Yahoo and other search sites, which it will add to the options soon after the introduction.

Note the discussion re AdManager and its simplified tools, also shared by Google and Yahoo!’s Panama. I have yet to investigate with the good folks in Redmond but will do so.

AdManager, as well as Google‘s Starter Edition and Panama’s simplification, again raises the question of whether the SME market will see meaningful adoption of online marketing on a “pull” basis. There are plenty of voices out there who think it now and forever will be a “push” market.

Where do you come down?

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Here’s CNET’s video review and demo of Office Live.

Ingenio Announces Deal with Microsoft for Mobile

Ingenio announced a major distribution relationship with Microsoft. The deal right now is exclusively about Windows Live for mobile but it may extend in the future more broadly to online. Ingenio, however, declined to comment on that possibility. 

When users perform geotargeted searches on Windows Live for mobile they will see Ingenio PPCall advertisers if Ingenio has a relevant listing to serve. If not, there will be no ads shown.

Google and Yahoo! have started serving sponsored listings on their mobile products (not PPCall listings). PPCall, however, is a natural fit for mobile and in some ways more so than on the Internet.

Here’s more from my slightly longer post on Search Engine Watch.

Ingenio’s Marc Barach on PPCall

iMedia features an article on PPCall by Ingenio CMO Marc Barach with some case-study information. For those already familiar with PPCall, there are no revelations. It’s basically an overview with some interesting detail.

Yahoo! Beta Tests PPC Ads in Mobile

Yahoo is launching (in beta) paid-search ads in mobile in the U.S. and expanding its test program in the U.K. Only a “select group of advertisers” are initially included (it’s not clear what the criteria are). But the number of advertisers will expand over time as the program rolls out.

According to the press release, “consumers will be able to click on the sponsored search results to go to the advertisers’ mobile web site or a landing page to get more information about the advertisers’ offerings, including the ability to call the advertiser.”

Yahoo had already been running tests of mobile PPC ads in the U.K. and Japan.

Read the rest of this post on SEW.