Pay-Per-Call: What It Is and How It Works

Humankind is progressing at speed not known before. Perhaps the area that is changing the fastest is technology.

To think that less than 100 years ago, our grandparents and parents could enjoy the first TV sets, and now we spend most of our day with mobile phones in our hands. Technological evolution impacts most areas of life. Nearly everything changes. 

Some 95% of responders call or receive calls to communicate in their work or private life. This is where pay-per-call service steps in and changes how we do business.

The marketing tactic known as pay-per-click, targeted at those who love to surf and click some ads, is giving up its positions to pay-per-call marketing, praised by those who prefer to make calls. 

What Is Pay-Per-Call?

It is essential to implement pay-per-call advertising to build solid inbound marketing strategies, increase sales, and generate more revenue from calling customers. Pay-per-call is a carefully-crafted step-by-step phone call campaign that enables prospective customers to see your ads. 

Accordingly, pay-per-call leads that reach you using a unique trackable number are your hot leads interested in the products or services you advertise. As a part of performance marketing, you pay pay-per-call publishers or affiliates only for the achieved objectives. 

The 2021 State of B2B Social Media Marketing study, released by Oktopost, revealed figures indicating that pay-per-call ranked as the third top-growing marketing channel of the last year, next only to social media (82%) and website (67%). It deserves careful consideration since it is already among the top fastest-growing marketing channels. 

Source: Oktopost

How Does Pay-Per-Call Work?

Let’s take a look at a few basic steps that take place during every pay-per-call affiliate marketing campaign:

1. A company, brand, or advertiser places an order with pay-per-call publishers, marketing affiliates, or performance agencies.
2. A publisher creates content for a pay-per-call affiliate offer and sets it up on specific websites targeting prospective customers.
3. A caller sees an ad, dials a unique tracking number, and gets transferred to the advertiser.

In a nutshell, an advertiser is paying a publisher for qualified leads. Depending on the deal, an advertiser can pay per call or a commission for a sale. 

Further, we will highlight why pay-per-call affiliate networks are so popular nowadays and why taking notice is essential.

What Are the Benefits of Pay-Per-Call?

• It’s measurable: The analytics you have at your disposal can quickly determine which ads and campaigns, and at what time of the day, drove those pay-per-call leads to pick up the phone and call you. It’s a marketer’s dream – this data proves what’s working and isn’t and what needs improvement.
• It is not expensive: The great news is that pay-per-call software is affordable, even for new businesses. It’s far more affordable than traditional media, such as radio, television, airtime, and print. The production costs for your radio and television commercials can be sky-high, and they still do not guarantee to attract clients and drive calls.

The benefit of a pay-per-call service is that you can test them without a considerable investment. This less expensive introduction to the marketing processes will allow you to get your feet wet regardless of your industry, and you can learn some things at a much lower cost.

• It’s only qualified calls: The advertiser only pays for pay-per-call leads when receiving qualified phone calls. Before starting a phone call campaign, the advertiser and the publisher define “a qualified” phone call. The two parties must discuss the duration of the call, the time and place it was received from, whether the call resulted in a sale or not, and other specifications.
• Time-saving: Pay-per-call advertising can increase distribution and inbound call volume across many channels with the least amount of work for the brand.
• More visibility: Brands have complete visibility and control over call volume and customer experience. Maintaining a company reputation and offering the most excellent customer experience while working with new publishers is crucial. Advertisers can try out new pay-per-call marketing strategies and initiatives with low risk with the control they need.
• It’s how we shop now: If pay-per-call advertising is still not a part of your marketing mix, you’re not just risking getting stuck in the past but also losing business. If you worry that it’s just young people that use pay-per-call software—you could not be more wrong. The number of people 55+ who use mobile phones in shopping is increasing. What does this mean to you? You need to start implementing mobile marketing strategies immediately, and pay-per-call could be perfect for you. Brands need to master pay-per-call marketing because future customers will be using it even more.

Research shows that calls from mobile sources are overwhelmingly relevant. The study shows that 70% of searchers using mobile search used click-to-call. Impressive, isn’t it? According to Google, 98% of customers worldwide shop online, including searching for the product, learning about it, and making a purchase. Running online advertisements is the ideal approach to get your products in front of customers, especially with so many people using the internet to shop. 

Source: ThinkWithGoogle

• It’s profitable. Since more and more consumers use phones for product research, pay-per-call affiliate strategies can help drive sales and improve conversion rates. It’s hardly surprising that customers prefer speaking with salespeople over completing forms. Pay-per-call provides a personalized experience, which helps to convert cold leads into hot ones.

A Few Tips on How to Start a Pay-Per-Call Business

Pay-per-call is more complicated than just posting your company’s phone number on landing sites, social media, and banner advertisements. Without a step-by-step plan, you will hardly succeed. 

• Set a long-term goal: You must set your objectives before creating and launching a pay-per-call advertising campaign. How else can you evaluate the success of your campaign if you don’t know what metrics and outcomes you’re after?
• Report, track, and analyze: You must understand how your pay-per-call campaign is functioning if you want it to be effective in the long term. This kind of performance marketing cannot be set up once and left alone, and it needs constant analyzing, reporting, investigation, and fine-tuning. Fortunately, pay-per-call service providers offer some primary ways to analyze the calls that you receive.

• Pick different phone numbers for every social channel: Emails, social media, and landing pages should display different numbers so that you may keep track of the channels that bring in the most income.
• Track customers before they make a call: Dynamic call tracking automatically uses a piece of a website’s or a landing page’s code to fill in a phone number. They may then record every online customer interaction before making that call. With this tracking, you may learn the precise keywords your callers typed and the pages they visited before.
• Choose the best pay-per-call software: We’ve made our case about why taking advantage of pay-per-call is crucial. Now it’s time for you to do the rest!

Next Steps

What more can you do to optimize your PPC campaigns? Choose a call tracking software that provides end-to-end analytics and access to actionable data to power your phone call campaign. 

Tapping into Call Logic, Phonexa’s call tracking and distribution software will help you power your pay-per-call campaigns with the tracking and attribution you need to have successful outcomes from every single call. 

Schedule consultation with one of Phonexa’s experts to learn more.