BIA Kelsey Predicts Pay-per-call is Growin' & Goin' Mobile

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John Wanamaker, owner of Oak Hall retail store, said it best when he stated, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” The truth is, businesses of all sizes have long been plagued by the challenge of where best to spend their advertising dollars and how to get an accurate sense of their ROI. Want RingRevenue to help you see which half you are wasting? Click here. 

The Kelsey Report, an advisory service for the global Yellow Pages industry, recently released a detailed report, "Call-Based Ads: Eliminating the Unknown From Advertising", on the fast growing pay-per-call industry and how it and its variants are steadily helping to solve this challenge. 

The report discusses how consumers’ media diet is richer than ever, visiting, on average, 3,500 pages of internet content in any given month-- yowza! And let’s not forget watching TV, checking social-media (confession: I have peeked at my facebook twice since starting this article), and various offline media.

The rapid increase in media channels has forced businesses to react in kind with their marketing efforts. According to BIA/Kelsey's research, the average number of media channels used by small-to-medium businesses to attract customers has grown 75% over the past two years. Media channel options are not the only thing soaring; the report also points out the rapid growth in smartphone penetration, and predicts mobile will soon change EVERYTHING. That is a strong, bold statement... or is it?

BIA/Kelsey states that, “mobile is about to unleash a massive increase in call-based ad inventory, which will be so vast that many established companies will scramble to align their advertising portfolios to accept call-based ad products.” Additionally, the report predicts by 2015 local searches from mobile devices will equal those done on a desktop, and the following year, mobile local searches will surpass local desktop searches by nearly 30 billion queries. 

So what, might you ask, is BIA/Kelsey getting at here, and more importantly, when do we get to solving this challenge? I am getting there soon, I promise. All of these factors lead back to what BIA/Kelsey refers to as the advertising’s holy grail: measuring ROI. According to the report, the No. 1 way advertisers measure value, even above in-store visits, is telephone calls. Basically, calls are the new currency.  

After surveying dozens of major search engines, ad networks, local search and mobile providers, the overwhelming consensus is that mobile drives more telephone traffic. Their research showed that, "on average, call conversion from a desktop local seach is 7% once a local landing page is viewed, vs. 57% from a mobile device. [Mobile] solutions drive telephone calls as high as 62%." This statistic corroborates what we've seen with our own platform, where nearly 50% of phone calls are being driven by consumers on their mobile device. 

Quick Recap: According to the report, everyone is going mobile, companies value phone calls, and mobile drives more calls. Not all phone calls, however, are created equal. Getting a large amount of bad calls (misdials, support calls, essentially--non sales calls) means time away from good calls. Here is where the solution comes in, are you ready for it? BIA/Kelsey stresses the crucial value of call analytics and interactive voice response (IVR). Because an increase in mobile will lead to an increase in call volume, companies will require a filtering system to weed out the good calls from the bad calls. With call analytics and an IVR available, companies will be able to do just that. Based off of their findings, BIA/Kelsey attributes a handful of companies that will define this market (RingRevenue among them) and will have the following characteristics:

1. Hundreds of thousands of deployed call tracking lines
2. A large ad-based network across multiple media channels and publishers
3. Technical analysis around voice recognition, speech to text, etc.
4. Deep integration with business where continuous vetting and scoring of calls can be monitored
5. A focus on call-based solutions

For RingRevenue, it is an honor to be featured in The Kelsey Report and recognized as one of the leaders in this fast growing industry. If you want to learn more on how mobile click-to-call delivers increased revenue and better ROI click here. 

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