Thoughts on Pay-Per-Call Test Program

If you've been reading this blog you'll know I began a test program on Ingenio's pay-per-call service.

As an advertiser it is set-up much like pay-per-click: You bid for positions on the top search engine results pages (SERPs) related to the users search. But a key difference with Ingenio is that your bid will cover a product category. So one of my categories is Internet Advertising Mediums, that covers SEO, SEM and e-mail marketing program services. I am covering a wide swath of keywords and getting great page impressions (people seeing my ad) in the search engines listing Ingenio's ads.

So far AOL Search and FindWhat are part of the Ingenio network.

I've been part of Ingenio's beta since early March, but things didn't really start happening until April 11 when AOL Search started providing pay-per-call ads on their SERPs.

Results for me have been disappoint so far, but I'm still hopeful of the service and the results I can start getting. Of the four calls I've received so far, three were of no value and the fourth I missed the call al together (An important point is to only have the ad active when you are by your phone, duh!). Of the callers I talked with, they were either confused by what they were calling about or wanted to ask a question about something totally unrelated to my ad.

To Ingenio's credit they refunded the cost of the three live calls I got when I phoned them and complained.

So to sum-up, I'm not writing off pay-per-call just yet and I can't recommend it to my clients, but I haven't seen the results I was hoping for.

Bob Erwin
NewInk Marketing
Local Internet Marketing for Small Business