Today we’re proud to announce that Tradedoubler – the performance marketing network with over 2,000 advertisers – has chosen our technology platform and application programming interface (API) so it can offer clickable phone numbers and tracking analytics to its advertisers.

Besides the fact that our technology is proven – actually works, and does what we promise – Tradedoubler’s CEO, Rob Wilson said we won the business because they didn’t have to reinvent the wheel; they’re now able to add clickable, trackable phone numbers to their ad formats with just a couple of lines of code.

That’s important, he added, because ads with built-in communications convert on average six times better than a traditional online or mobile display ad.

But what makes us especially proud is that Tradedoubler is joining Zanox Europe, Affiliate Window, Webgains, Affilired, and eBay Europe, among other European affiliate networks now trusting the Freespee platform for empowering their advertising formats with voice communication.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with all of our products and services, our API is used by developers in the advertising industry to get access to the Freespee platform for integrating communication services into their content and customer relationship management systems, mobile applications, web analytics, or ad serving.

Our analytics application comprises management functions, real-time number provisioning, call tracking and conversion attribution, so advertisers and platform owners can optimize marketing campaigns based on which websites generate the most calls that convert to sales.

So, welcome Tradedoubler! We’re thrilled and proud to have you as a member of our rapidly growing family.

To run a click-to-call campaign with Tradedoubler, or become a publisher, please fill out this form.

We’re excited to introduce you to the first of our very own heroes – the smart and suave Mr Freeman, who with Freespee’s help experienced the magic of accurate data and thereby reaped the rewards of his mobile campaign. Enjoy this video and learn his story:

What makes this video so special for us is that it is actually based on the real story of one of our most devoted customers. The Swedish car rental company MABI Hyrbilar had gone through the same pain as Mr Freeman did, before they came across Freespee who helped them to embrace their mobile marketing efforts and achieve success:

‘In the car rental business a lot of potential customers prefer to call before making up their mind, so analyzing those conversions is of crucial importance for us,’ says Ronnie Brodin, MABI’s marketing director. ‘We’d been looking for a smart way to do it and discovered Freespee. It has become a real eye-opener for us, demonstrating, loud and clear, which marketing channels are driving us calls and, in the long run, sales. Armed with Freespee data, we concentrated more heavily on specific channels, such as Google Adwords, Facebook, hitta.se, mabi.se and as a result our customer acquisition costs has lowered significantly. We’re thrilled by the results and will in the future rely on Freespee in our ad spending.’

Stay tuned for more Freespee stories and videos as well as other great things which we have lined up for the next couple of months!

Today we are excited to introduce two new members of the rapidly growing Freespee team. Love will be doing some PHP magic as a part of our dev team and Alena will be building the sophisticated Freespee community in her role as a community manager. You can read their stories below and make sure to check out our job board for open positions – maybe you are our next amazing colleague?

Alena Rybik | Community & Customer Service Manager

Alena first got her feet wet with online communities about five years ago, and was caught for life. Since then she has been building and managing thriving communities for Goodbeans and Massive Media, to name a few. She has a wide knowledge of European languages and a truly international background, having lived and worked in a number of different cities in the recent couple of years. She is passionate about startup culture, open source, web development and social media.

Love Toborn | Developer

Love began freelancing as a web developer during his university studies and has continued working on different projects within the area since. He got experience from affiliate marketing, online gaming and search result analysis.
Except from both frontend and backend development, Love is also very interested in online marketing and e-commerce. In his spare time he often produces various kinds of electronic music which rarely turns out as they’re supposed to.

Welcome Alena and Love, we are happy to have you on board!

We have reached a major milestone: Over 10 million calls - realtime conversations between buyers and sellers – have gone through Freespee and added value to our advertisers, publisher and partner networks.

It’s time to celebrate!!
Out of the 15 countries we are  live in, advertisers in the UK, Sweden, Denmark and Netherlands can now sign-up for Freespee Analytics directly at www.freespee.com – we are working hard to add more countries very soon! If you are a publisher, ad network or large advertiser that receives hundreds or thousands of calls per day, you can contact us to get started right away.

Why Freespee Analytics? We enable advertisers to analyze calls from any advertising source – especially now with the exponential growth of mobile advertising, click-to-call can be the most cost efficient way of getting more sales leads and driving revenue growth. Without call tracking and analytics, your marketing efforts are like a black hole, whenever the customer prefers contacting by phone.

Try it yourself! We also offer a completely free version to track calls from smartphone browsers. Getting started takes 5 minutes, just register and add the tracking code to your site!

It’s that time of the year again – looking back at accomplishments, setting sights for the upcoming year and spending some relaxing, quality time with friends and family.

• Tripled the call traffic managed by our platform

• Started to work directly with advertisers, who are all as excited as us when they see how successful mobile click-to-call campaigns can drive revenue

• Introduced a self-serve offer, which can be used by small business owners. Anyone is welcome to use Freespee: there is even a 100% free version for start-ups!

Wish you all Merry Christmas & Prosperous New Year 2013!

This week Facebook brought a new feature to its mobile apps to discover businesses close to your location, adding to the ranks of YP apps, Foursquare, Yelp et al. The search results are enriched by, without a doubt, the largest social graph available – so you know which places your friends like to go.

Here’s how it looks. The click-to-call function is automatically enabled if the business Page includes a phone number.

It’s still too early to say how popular this feature will be among consumers, but it can indeed be a game-changer. Advertisers can already get insights into the incremental phone leads the feature creates – with Freespee Analytics Premium edition. The call analytics include both mobile and desktop traffic, further improving the visibility of social media marketing ROI.

While tens of thousands of companies already enjoy the benefits of Freespee call analytics, there are even more of those who haven’t yet tried it out.

To help you get started, we have launched a 100% free, limited edition of Freespee Analytics for mobile click-to-call tracking!

The self-service sign-ups will be rolled out country by country. Whether your country is already eligible, you can find out on the sign-up form at www.freespee.com. If we’re not yet live in your market, please enter your email address and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can. Publishers, ad networks, and agencies should contact us directly.

In case your business is located outside of Europe & North America, you can always use the Freespee Mobile App Tracking SDK to add call tracking to your native iPhone and Android applications.

We have also improved the advertiser price list to make it easier to choose between the different editions. Please note that the pricing can vary between countries.

Whether you install our script on a desktop or mobile website, the free version measures calls from visitors who access the site with their smartphones. It’s very easy to get started – no risk and no need to enter your credit card information.

Later you can easily upgrade to the Premium edition – starting at 19€/month (VAT 0%), you will get even more features. Why not give it a try!

Internet browsing on smartphones is exploding so fast globally, it’s hard to keep up. Once again it’s important to remember that you can’t transfer your marketing strategy from desktop to mobile without adjusting it. Or you can – Google actually makes it very easy to extend ads to mobile devices – but you definitely shouldn’t, because you will only get poor performance.

Why? The reason is simply that even if you have a mobile-optimized website (most companies still don’t), user interaction will be different than on desktop browsing. Forms and complicated e-commerce menus simply don’t work. People are used to getting what they want with just a few clicks and without typing lots of text.

But help is at hand, and it’s the native mobile ad format: click-to-call.

Here’s what it looks like on your phone, and how you can add it to your own ads:

Without the Call Extension

• This is what a standard ad looks like when extended directly from the desktop to mobile

• There’s no way to call the advertiser directly, instead the user has to click to go to the website first

• Make sure your website is mobile-optimized and includes working click-to-call links or buttons

Call Extension + Web link

AdWords / Add call extension:

“Both my website and the phone number”

• The user has two options: click through to the website or call the advertiser directly

• This is the best option if you have a mobile-optimized site

• The phone number is hidden until the user clicks the button

• It’s a great way to differentiate yourself from your competitors!

Call Extension only

AdWords / Add call extension:

“Just the phone number”

• This is the best option if you just want to drive calls from advertising and don’t have a mobile-optimized website that converts well

• Your phone number is visible on the headline – the user can click the headline or the click-to-call button

Important: The campaign needs to be targeted to smartphones only (not desktop or tablets), otherwise this doesn’t work!

Now it’s time to try it for yourself!

1. Log in to AdWords, edit your existing campaign or create a new one. You can add a Call Extension during the campaign creation phase or add it afterwards by going to the Ad extensions tab and selecting New extension.

Next, select options (described above) and enter a phone number.

Note that you should always use a call tracking number to measure campaign performance. Currently Google only offers call forwarding number in the US, the UK and Germany to enable Call Metrics. Without call analytics, you will only know how many people have clicked the phone number (call attempt) and not how many calls actually took place (connected calls).

Using Freespee Analytics in combination with Google advertising, you will get many benefits, including:

• Measure phone calls from both the ad as well as your landing page
• Get statistics beyond the click: how many calls took place, which of them were connected and how many calls were left unanswered
• Record the calls for conversion and customer service improvements
• Callers’ full phone numbers (which Google’s Call Metrics does not provide)
• Missed call notifications by email and/or SMS
• Campaign-specific voice messages or voicemail
• Call tracking numbers for countries Google doesn’t yet support
• And much more!

Sign-up for Freespee Analytics to get started! If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact me at juhani.polkko@freespee.com.

Today is a big day for Freespee – and we are indeed very excited.

We are happy to announce that Freespee has raised a €3.3 million financing round from a new investor, Denmark’s Sunstone Capital. Please find the full press release in English, Swedish, Finnish and German.

You can also find coverage of the news on TechCrunch.

There are plenty of things happening, which we will tell more about soon – but here’s a summary:

• Our average daily call traffic has increased 4X since 2011 – most attributed to traffic from smartphone apps and browsing
• We now allow advertisers to sign-up directly for Freespee Analytics
• We have announced a new product called Freespee Ads (beta)
• We will soon open a new commercial office in London, United Kingdom
• We are hiring – several positions open in Uppsala and Berlin

Despite all the new things, we continue mobile click-to-call advertising innovation and full-steam development of the Freespee platform, as well as continue to fully support anyone using or wanting to use our platform through the Freespee API.

I would like to thank all our partners, clients, team members, investors and other stakeholders. So far so good – this is only the beginning of the Mobile Era.

Please drop me an email or call if you have any questions about today’s news.

Thank you and best regards,

Carl Holmquist

Founder & CEO of Freespee (contact info)

P.S. You can follow our updates on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, and subscribe to our blog by RSS.

Freespee is growing – we currently have several open positions in Uppsala and Berlin, and more coming.

Please find the current available positions at http://www.freespee.com/jobs

This week we would like to welcome four new Freespee team members:

Lisa Sommer | Senior User Experience Designer

“Lisa has 7 years of international experience in mobile user experience. Lisa strives to create aesthetic solutions with a clear focus and message, designed from an understanding of the customer’s business and the end-users’ situation, capabilities and needs.

Prior to Freespee, Lisa has been working for Creuna, Scandinavia’s largest digital agency, for customers like Post Danmark, Metro, Nordea and Nets. As former Director of the UX team at mobilePeople, she has also worked with some of the largest customers in the local search industry such as Sesam (Schibsted), Eniro, EDSA, Trudon, Truvo, FAST, Sensis, RHD and Yell.”

Erik Lantto | Developer

”Erik is a self-taught programmer with a background in economics. Realizing that programming was his true call, he started his own software company and eventually moved abroad to work for one of the world’s most popular online gaming companies.

Besides doing PHP and javascript magic at Freespee, Erik likes to make games in HTML5 and produce bass-heavy electronic music. He has a soft spot for startup culture, and is always up-to-date with the latest internet trends and technologies.”

Pablo Fernández | Developer

”Native from Argentina, Pablo has been moving around and working in a few cities both inside and outside of his home country for the last few years. Although mostly specialized in Java technologies, he has been in contact with many other developing technologies as a result of working in a variety of companies with different focuses and work approaches.

He enjoys the outdoors, particularly the woods and mountains. His hobbies include practicing both summer and winter sports, reading and traveling.”

Niels de Groot | Commercial Manager

”Niels is one of the latest additions to our team. He was born and raised in the Netherlands where he studied retail and sports management before he moved to Northern Sweden to pursue an MSc in Management and Marketing. During his time there he started his own company and was active in several student projects.

In his spare time he enjoys sports such as football and floorball, but a good pack of snow to slide down from is always welcome as well!”