Mobile Marketing With Pay Per Call
As an Internet Marketer I always like to try new ways to monetize my sites and generate some good old $$. Recently I have been playing around with Mobile Pay Per Call advertising.
I kicked off by interviewing Mundo Media on how to promote Pay Per Call Offers and then went on to host a special webinar with RingRevenue on their Pay Per Call Performance tracking platform.
Both of these interviews gave a lot of info on the inner workings of pay per call. Duru as I am I decided to run a pay per call campaign and see for myself if this is really an area worth investing time and resources. Here is the recap of my Pay Per Call experiment.
Selecting a Pay Per Call Offer to Promote
Using the Mundo Media Pay Per Call affiliate network I selected a pay per call offer. This in itself can be a challenging process. How do you decide what to promote? Should I go by payout or by estimated conversion rate?
My first move was to talk to my affiliate manager and ask him which pay per call offers are currently converting. My affiliate manager is great, not only did we converse on Skype, he also sent me a top offers report to help me make my offer selection.
Here is a quick video I made helping to decipher a Mundo Media Top Offers Report
Making a Test Call
Once I narrowed down my search to a few potential offers I asked my affiliate manager to get me recordings of the offer test calls. This is a very important step in selecting an offer – you must see what your target browser will receive when they make the call!
People residing in the US can easily place a test call within the RingRevenue system. However for international affiliates this can be a problem.
Not only will making a test call or listening to the call recording help you determine whether this is a quality offer worth driving traffic to, it will also help you understand exactly what the service is about, allowing you to do better keyword research (next step).
Pay Per Call Offer Keyword Research
Seeing as I was going to promote the pay per call offer using mobile Adwords ads with call extensions knew that I would be paying for all calls. I had no idea how many impressions it would take in Adwords to get some clicks and had only a rough estimate of how many calls it would take on average to make a conversion (just a general idea from the offer stats provided to my by my affiliate manager). I also needed to find the right keywords that would get the people to click on the phone number and pay for those clicks.
The click through rates in the top offer report are about how many calls out of x calls convert into qualified calls. These stats have nothing to do with your Adwords click through rate.
Finding the right keywords for pay per call offers can be challenging.
I discovered that offers with high payouts usually came with keywords with a high cost per click. I buried myself in keyword research for two offers, trying to decide which one to run.
I decided to put up a campaign and see if Pay Per call really is all the rage in mobile marketing.
Mobile Pay Per Call Campaign Components
To run a mobile pay per call campaign you will need the following:
- Test Call
- Keyword list
- Content network display URLs (if you want to promote on the content network)
- Ad copy
- Telephone number with tracking from Ring Revenue
- Landing Page (in this case I built a WordPress mobile website.)
- Content for the landing page (landing page and website content will affect your Adwords quality score, make sure your site is Adwords compliant before you run any traffic!)
- Pay Per call creatives or complimentary CPA offers for website.
The Results of My Pay Per Call Campaign Experiment
- I ran my pay per call campaign offer for a few weeks.
- Tweaking ad copy, creating competing ads and optimizing keywords and bids is essential to make money with pay per call. You can’t just let the Adwords campaign run on autopilot after setup.
- Continuing to build the website and some SEO resulted in some land line conversions as well.
- To really make money with pay per call you need big volume. Once you find the right keyword formula, you will need to send big traffic to your ads to really make significant cash. So if you test Adwords starting with a $10 and then $50 budget, to make money you need to scale to spend at least a couple of hundred a day to make it work.
Pay Per call campaign results
As you can see in the screen shot of my campaign stats on the left, my campaign performed better than the estimated Network EPC.
While this is not bad, I can’t say it was really worth the effort.
I would certainly use pay per call campaigns to further monetize niche websites when relevant, though going the Adwords route is a big commitment and takes bigger volume to have something to write home about…
Have you been running pay per call campaigns? Share your experiences and questions in the comments below!
Hey Shira, I think CR means Conversion Rate not Clickthrough Rate you’re mentioning in the video.
Wow thanks for noticing Manuel! Will add on an annotation 🙂
I find that you NEED to follow the entire conversion process.
From the adwords campaign setup, to keywords research (phrase/exact/negatives), to the bid prices (QS), to the dropped calls, and finally to tracking the phone call quality.
And even then, there are outside factors that you just can’t overcome (ie. call dropping in adwords, and poor targeting info from the advertiser).
Yet, at the same time, I’ve made $400+ from free calls from Google for a single campaign, so there are variable pluses.
Very well put Leonidas! There are many variables, some you might discover only deep into the campaign..
One thing I do is get as much info about the offer from my affiliate manager and have them ask the advertiser a load of questions 🙂
One of the biggest wins I did, was actually LISTENING to the calls.
For example, the dental offer on mundo-media, had callers call in looking for a specific dentist, or address directions. This was due to generic ‘dynamic’ ad-copy, and callers simply using the call as a targeted look-up service.
As a result, your options include changing the ad-copy, and more accurate keyword research.
Yes Leonidas, listening to the calls is ultra important. Here is an important tip I didn’t include in the article above –
If you are located outside of the US you may not be able to place a test call within the RingRevenue system.
I solved this problem by asking my affiliate manager (who is a real mensch) to send me mp3 recordings of the calls! This is so important that I will add it to the list of Pay Per Call campaign components above!
It would be much simpler to get sample recordings in the system for each offer, but I guess that is too much to ask for….
The test call itself as well as the Q&A with the advertiser are a good starting point for keyword research.
You can use Google voice within Gmail to place a test call on your promo numbers.
And I recommend a call tracking platform to listen in on the calls such as TollFreeForwarding: http://www.premium23.com/tracking-your-pay-per-call-traffic-quality/
And like you said, you need to go through a quick QA to assess the call-center conversion rate.
An efficient call-center will try to get poor leads off the line as quickly as possible.
I’ve sent broad spanish debt consolidation traffic with the keyword: prestamos (loan), thinking it would convert on a debt consolidation offer. Sadly, they didn’t convert… but I learned this only from listening to the calls themselves.
Great Resources Leonidas! Will check out the call forwarding.
Am going for an organic Pay Per Call campaign next 🙂
Hey, great post. I am killing ppCall with free traffic but want to get into paid as well. I never ever used adwords. What was the price per click you were paying for your campaign?
Hi Kamal,
Thanks for sharing, cool, would love to hear more about how you are sending traffic to Pay Per Call.
My Adwords campaign cost changed over time and depended on the keywords I chose, my Quality score and conversions of course so it was a range $1-2 per click…
Best,
~Duru
I started with Adwords and found a couple of super-targeted campaigns (based on state and state keywords) that give me a little profitable trickle each day, but they’re not really scalable as they are so specific. Ideally I’d find 20 – 30 campaigns that work this way and then I’d really be in the money 🙂 In the meantime, I started playing around with free traffic, and good old fashioned offline advertising – with my ppc number integrated. Offline advertising is AWESOME for offers that have psycho expensive keywords such as anything in Finance, Insurance etc. Which is great since their payouts are really good. There’s some real potential here, but I’ve only been playing round with it for a few weeks so more testing is needed to establish if I can really get away with some outrageous shit and make it scalable. But so far, the profits have been good 🙂 I’ll let you know how it goes 😉
Great post. Curious about how much mobile traffic is available on adwords versus other mobile ad networks. And since Google owns Admob, if you set up a campaign there is it any different from targeting mobile browsers inside Adwords? Also, I am interested in offline promotion of pay per call offers because I have experience with print media. What are some good networks that have a good selection of pay per call offers that allow offline promotion. Many of the offers in RingRevenue for example only allow click to call. Thanks all, cheers, – Mike
Hi Mike,
For Pay Per Call offers regular Adwords is best. I don’t think Admob ads convert for this type of media.
Ring Revenue does not represent advertisers. They are the call tracking platform.
I have seen many offline Pay Per call offers in Mundo Media. When you check out an offer expand the promotional methods allowed to reveal additional options you may not see at first glance.
You might also try OfferMobi and Hasoffers. I know Neverblue will also be introducing Pay Per Call offers very soon, whether or not you can promote offers offline depends on each advertiser. I know a few people that are hitting it big with radio and billboard ads but haven’t tried it yet personally. Let us know if you find a great one!
~Duru
I’ve tried a couple fiverr radio gigs, and used a commercial, without much success.
There is limited transparency with internet radio with the fiverr gigs, and tracking is limited as well. Either you are profitable, or you are not.
Thanks for sharing your radio advertising experience Leonidas! Have you tried real radio (like late night or local) as opposed to Internet radio to promote Pay Per Call offers?
I’m thinking of running a few campaigns on the display network only as I believe you can still advertise your number within the ad copy. I’m having difficulties with landing pages though…
Whats the consensus with pay per call landing pages? I know quality score is very important.. Being able to use a template would be ideal so I could easily test different offers. Even if I was to build a webpage/site around one offer I have no idea how to structure a landing page for pay per call…
Hi Thomas,
You need to watch out to include enough related content on your landing pages to keep your quality score up. You also want your URL to make sense. For this reason I actually build small websites to support Pay per call offers and not just a single landing page.
Not sure what you mean by a template. You can put some effort into create a mobile website “template” once and then simply clone it for each offer using a WordPress cloner (my favorite is wptwin) and then enter in your new offer related content.
What specifically do you need to know about structuring a website for pay per call? I will put a post together about this to give you some better instruction. Pls give me a hint on the points you would benefit from learning 🙂
Take action and have a great day!
~Duru
Thanks for sharing, I didn’t think to inquire about test calls! I was playing around with the idea of jumping into pay-per-call affiliate programs a while back but have been hesitant to jump in.
I thought about running PPC or Adwords for a few I looked at, but was concerned about conversion rates.
After reading your post I might have to give this a run in a month or two.