Online search has grown at an incredible rate, this we all know. It is now apparent that the staggering growth rate of the industry has indeed surpassed the growth rate of any other advertising medium. The latest dimension to online search is 'Pay-per-call' search and this new service could open the doors of search advertising to those who previously may not have found it suitable.
Large corporations have cashed in on the online opportunities available to them and have seen healthy returns from search marketing such as PPC and SEO. Regional and local firms however may be yet to really see an opportunity to benefit from online opportunities. It is often forgotten that around 70% of small businesses are service orientated. Trade service men and attorneys for example still get much more business from phone calls than from click-throughs simply due to the nature of their work. It is in these areas that we could soon see huge online opportunity as a result of the developments of Pay-per-call search.
What is Pay-per-call?
Pay-per-call search is simply a form of response to searching where the user is given a phone number to respond to in addition to or instead of a link. Previously Pay-per-call had its limitations due to cost implications of phone calls and the physical gap between PC and telephone. With the ongoing improvements made to Skype software, however, we have reason to assume that this method of advertising could be soon to take off.
So what is Skype?
Skype is softphone based software with all PC-to-PC calls to and from Skype subscribers charged as free. SkypeOut is also available and lets users dial a regular telephone for a per-minute charge. Introduced in July 2004, within a year more than a hundred million people downloaded the software. By 2005 Skype was said to have around 40 million users globally. In the same year it was bought over by internet auction giants Ebay for $2.6 billion.
I think it is apparent that we now have the ingredients for a new search recipe!
Local Search in the UK at present has little impact on the e-commerce bottom line but this could indeed change with Pay-per-call. By utilising Skype and Pay-per-call search, companies will be able to monitor the direct impact of their online efforts, offline. Pay-per-call solves a problem for the millions of businesses that don't have a web presence, but still want to be found by online searchers. Companies will see the huge benefits of running totally transparent advertising campaigns using Pay-per-call. They will be able to accurately track return on investment (ROI) down to a cost per sale level. As with PPC advertising, the structure of Pay-per-call will show immediate results.
Although Pay-per-call is in very early stages of development the potential here is huge. Lets see how it develops. You read it here first!
