Will Pay Per Call Be The End Of Pay Per Click And The Yellow Pages

I don’t think so but I do think that it may be the ultimate easy way of determining effectiveness for small and mid-sized businesses. Ultimately for most small businesses tracking is very unscientific. They run an ad, people come in and buy things or they don’t. If they do come in and buy the ad is effective, if they don’t it isn’t. Not really a good system but literally billions of dollars of small business advertising decisions are made this way.

The reason (among many) that is a very poor process of determining ad effectiveness as it doesn’t take into account the number of leads you are generating or look at where the system may be broken. It also never accurately determines where people actually heard about the business unless it is the very first ad you’ve ever run for your new business. The experience someone has with your receptionist, your salesperson or even your phone system may ultimately determine whether or not they do business with you and has nothing at all to do with the effectiveness of the advertising medium.

Ingenio has developed a very unique spin on pay per click, it is pay per call. When searching for local products or services your are directed to a number than instantly transfers you seamlessly through their system to the vendor. Very targeted traffic that you can measure.

While I think this holds tremendous potential for people who don't have websites but do want to take advantage of websearches for product categories, the challenge that remains is that people want information before calling in many cases and that has been the traditional value of pay per click combined with a website.

This could be trouble for traditional yellow pages though.