Pay-per-call: enter the new PPC

If you haven’t already heard, there’s a new black in online advertising: pay-per-call. For businesses that would prefer to have customers phone them directly, rather than visit their website, pay-per-call could be the solution.

Sensis is doing a trial run of a pay-per-call system with their BidSmart service. It seems like consumers and businesses both win – users don’t have to pay for the calls, and advertisers receive phone leads rather than, or in addition to, website hits. And just like PPC, the ROI is extremely transparent; in fact it’s probably more transparent, since PPCall seems less open to fraud.

With the Sensis system, a “Click to Call” button is displayed along with the regular sponsored search results. Clicking on this button brings up a pop-up where you enter your phone number and the time you’d like to be called, up to 5 minutes. Your phone then rings and you are connected to the advertiser. The advertiser is billed when the call is successfully connected and passes a minimum time criterion.

According to the Age, there’s a huge market for PPCall:

The Kelsey Group, a market-research firm based in Princeton, New Jersey, projects that pay-per-call will become a $US1.4 billion to $US4 billion industry by 2009. That would roughly parallel the recent growth of pay-per-click advertising, which jumped from about $US100 million in 2000 to $US3.1 billion last year, according to Jupiter Research.

According to the Kelsey report, 80% of consumers surveyed said that they preferred contacting a business by the most direct method, that is, by phone. This certainly doesn’t spell the end of cost-per-click advertising – ebay isn’t likely to want many phone calls – but it is another interesting development in the pay-per market.