Pay Per Call Advertising ... Interesting Idea!

An interesting idea has recently popped up in online advertising. It is called Pay Per Call. AOL is the first of the big companies to experiment with this.

At the moment a company called Ingenio provides that service and infrastructure for AOL to do this. You can find out more about Pay Per Call advertising here


Pay Per Call works similarly to click-based advertising, except that it drives phone leads to your business, rather than clicks to an eCommerce website. It works like this: Consumers search for merchants or service providers in a designated geographic area. Then, relevant Pay Per Call ads appear in search results. When your business's ads appear in search results, consumers can reach you via the toll-free numbers that Ingenio provides in your Pay Per Call ads. These toll-free numbers forward calls directly to your business number as well as track calls for billing and reporting purposes. For each call that comes to your business this way, you pay the price per call that you bid in advance.


What's interesting about this is that something like this could work together with Pay-Per-Click advertising and appeal to those users that want to just make a phone call right away, instead of going to the website and search for the phone number there.

Additionally, this aproach doesn't seem to suffer from the problem of 'Click Fraud' unless someone decides to make fake calls: which is more time consuming.

Tags
Online Ads
Per Call
Ingenio
Technology