The pay-per-call industry is growing exponentially as businesses embrace PPC due to its higher conversion rates, customer spending, and retention.
With PPC continuing to grow in popularity, the industry is projected to reach a $12 billion valuation by 2025, with an annual growth rate of approximately 16%.
A recent episode of Phonexa’s Amplify webinar series hosted by Evan Weber (Founder of Publisher Finders) featured David Pickard (CEO of Phonexa UK) and Nareg Arakelian (Director of Operations at Profitise) as the three industry veterans analysed the latest trends in pay-per-call space.
The webinar provided a thorough exploration of PPC marketing as the trio delved deep into the strategies, trends, and technological advancements currently propelling the sector forward.
Here’s a summary of the pivotal insights discussed during the informative conversation.
Ideal Modality for Generating Traffic
Businesses thrive on inbound calls. Gone are the days of companies getting a bunch of lead forms and having to call people back to try to reach them. By driving inbound calls, businesses can connect consumers with call centres and achieve their objectives much faster.
To illustrate this point, Pickard cited a Forrester study which found that calls convert 30% faster than web leads, and they spend 28% more with a 28% higher retention rate. While these numbers indicate that spending money on generating calls instead of web leads is more beneficial, Pickard noted a trend of businesses pivoting toward generating both.
“We’re seeing the most success where clients are building hybrids, allowing the consumer to buy their product in the way that they want to buy it,” said Pickard. “Essentially, that is what Phonexa is trying to promote … take those warm consumers out of the marketplace as quickly as you can and track them as granularly as you can so you can go and reinvest in the things that are encouraging those positive conversion metrics.”
Pickard gave an example of working with clients who make substantial investments in web leads rather than focusing on calls.
“Sometimes it’s mind-blowing to tell them, ‘You just spent $50,000 on web leads last week – why don’t you just buy the calls instead?’” said Pickard. “If what you’re trying to do is actually speak to the customer, why don’t you allow them to call you? It’s surprising how many people don’t actually do that in the first place.”
In addition to neglecting to invest in calls, Pickard also explained that marketers often fail to track calls as effectively as they track web leads.
“A lot of people will track a web lead exponentially,” said Pickard. “They’ll track every little last detail to make sure that they’re optimising their advertising spend, but they don’t do it for calls; therefore, calls are getting treated unfairly in the marketplace when they’re not being tracked to the same level.”
3 Ways Calls Are Processed & Sold: Ping Post, Ping Tree & Host-and-Post
Pickard shared insight into how calls are processed and sold to lead buyers through ping post, ping tree, or host-and-post by breaking down each method.
Ping Post
“The lead is sent into the marketplace in the form of a ping, so you’re using some level of customer data to ping that data into your marketplace in one go to give all of your advertisers a chance to review that customer and give them an opportunity in real-time to decide whether they want to acquire that customer,” said Pickard.
The ping post method allows advertisers to dynamically bid against each other by asynchronously pinging all the data to everyone at once.
“The advanced routing is essentially quick matchmaking based on the campaign’s location and availability,” said Arakelian. “Now, when you go into that ping tree or when you go into the host-and-post, Phonexa has made it so easy for Profitise to take our business to the next level and continue scaling.”
Ping Tree
A ping tree is a distribution logic that offers more control and deliberation than a ping post.
“A ping tree is more of a one-by-one routing logic where you’re applying some kind of filtration initially and ranking your list of advertisers or buyers by a specific priority,” said Pickard. “It may be ranked by the price they’re prepared to pay, an advertiser of choice that you prefer 80% of your traffic goes to … or you may want to split test advertisers against each other to equally distribute calls between the two.”
Host-and-Post
Affiliates who aren’t technologically advanced in their lead management and call-tracking software typically go down the host-and-post route.
Host-and-post is determined by people owning their offers by building their own pages, sales funnels, and traffic funnels and distributing those customers to an end user. This process often entails using a hybrid between a ping tree and a ping post to route the customer to the end destination.
Arakelian shared a real-world example of a key disadvantage of using a ping-tree model, particularly in the call space.
“As an account manager, if you aren’t keeping an eye on your overall system and the schedule is wrong and you send a call to the buyer or the advertiser and their call centre is down, you’re just sending them free calls at that point,” said Arakelian. “For a ping post model, if you don’t get a response back with a bid, that call isn’t going anywhere – especially if you have them in the bid price.”
Since implementing Call Logic, Phonexa’s call intelligence platform equipped with ping post capabilities, Profitise has significantly improved its reporting and grown its business model.
Are you looking to bolster the ROI from your pay-per-call efforts? Choose your subscription plan or book a demo to learn more about Phonexa’s inbound call management platform.
Enhancing Lead Conversion With AI Chatbots
Regarding the emergence of AI in performance marketing, Pickard detailed a hybrid approach to facilitating lead conversion that involves buying web leads to take customers out of the marketplace and then converting them into calls through an AI chatbot. Leads then engage with the chatbot based on API data it received from the form filled out by the customer.
“They’re taking the customer out of the marketplace and warming them up to keep pushing them down that sales funnel,” said Pickard. “And then the AI is essentially analysing when the customer – based on what they’re saying – is at the best moment to give that call to action using that API data they’ve received from the web lead to nurture that conversation.”
Cheque out Amplify’s latest webinar: How to Scale Lead Generation Across Calls by Automating & Enhancing Outreach with Conversational AI.
Ensuring Quality of Incoming Calls
With a high volume of inbound calls, it’s important to ensure that each call meets an advertiser’s criteria. Pickard outlined how Phonexa optimises the process based on numbers. The key is tracking everything – call outcomes, the source of the call, the route that call went through, which publisher did it come from, which IVR model did it go through, which buyer bought the lead, etc. – in real time.
“That’s one thing many forget to do because their system doesn’t track things in real time or it’s difficult to actually pull the stats quickly enough for whatever reason – multiple dashboards may be required to pull data from various places,” said Pickard. “First things first, try and put everything in one place so that you can actually follow everything in one easy process.”
Pickard stressed how crucial it is to give your decision makers and media buying teams the right data so they can differentiate what works best from what doesn’t.
“Give them the right data to say ‘This is what’s happening, go do more of the stuff that’s working and less of the stuff that’s not working.’ That’s the performance marketing logic, but it’s surprising how many systems don’t allow you to do all of that quickly,” said Pickard.
Spotting issues on the fly as they occur in real time allows marketers to focus more on optimising their processes.
Robust fraud detection capabilities are also key to ensuring quality.
“We’ve got fraud detection set up to ensure that users aren’t living in a false economy,” said Pickard. “The numbers that they’re looking at are real numbers, the customers that they’re monitoring are real customers, doing the things they should be doing, coming from the places they should be coming from, and they’re not leaving themselves exposed to fraud.”
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