Pay-Per-Call Ads

BY RICH TEHRANI

A fairly new idea called pay-per-call advertising takes pay-per-click to the next level. According to Investor’s Business Daily, a company called Ingenio has partnered with AOL to provide advertisers with pay-per-call ads. Whereas a pay-per-click ad on Google can be purchased for as little as a few cents, $2.00 is the entry level fee for call-in leads via Ingenio’s new service.

When I hear of things like this I laugh because I remember many of the dotcom trailblazers telling me back in the nineties that the contact center was history because of the birth of the web. Of course they were all wrong as contact centers sprung up even faster to support e-commerce. Now, with advent of this type of service we have the potential to generate even more contact center traffic.

In my experience running TMC trade shows I can tell you we receive a good number of calls from people who want to pay for conferences whereas we receive no calls for people who want a free pass to the show. Conversely, free passes far outnumber the paid passes. Both of these passes can be obtained online but people would rather call when there is a lot of money on the line.

So it is possible that higher ticket items will receive more calls than low ticket ones. In fact according to the article, it seems the financial services market is happy with pay-per-call models and some of the companies in this space pay up to $15 per call!

Rich Tehrani is TMC's president. He welcomes your comments. Participate in our forums.