The impact of 1300 & 1800 "phone name" numbers in domain names?

We recently did some pay per click advertising work for a consumer website using a 1300 phone number as its domain name. What’s a “phone name” I hear some of you ask? It’s simply a 1300 or 1800 phone number that actually spells a business name / word if you look at the number keys on a touchpad phone - eg, the phone number for 1300 FOXTEL would be 1300 369 835, 1800 THRIFTY would be 1800 847 4389 etc. So a “phone name domain name” might be www.1300flowers.com.au or www.1800flowers.com, for instance. In the USA, there are several big-name websites that already use this domain name usage (1800flowers.com comes first to mind).

Interestingly, because I’ve never seen research on the effectiveness of these domains before, our client’s “phone name” URL got a good response from users - we saw high click-through results, results that actually surprised us a little.

I would be interested to hear from other agencies / companies if they have any “phone name” results they would like to share about their campaigns. I’m happy to keep the results on the low-down if you prefer.