The Freespee team is growing again and we’d like to give a warm welcome to Jessica (Partner Services) as well as Hannes (Finance & Control) – you can learn more about them below. Great to have you on board!

We would also like to remind about an open position for a Senior Developer in our joyful and intensely skilled platform development team. More information about the position and how to apply can be found at http://www.freespee.com/jobs – please apply by Februry 1st.

Looking forward to an exciting spring in the Call Advertising business!

Jessica Ogden | Director, Partner Service

Jessica brings 8 years of experience in the area of Customer Service and Delivery to Freespee. During her time as a delivery coordinator at IP-Only, Jessica managed delivery projects to large enterprises with high-powered telecom services. Jessica also has a background in planning and coordinating operational works at Com Hem as well as leading the production of photo finishing at Kodak Nordic.

Hannes Engdahl | CFO

Hannes has experience from a wide range of industries, including IT and Telecom, from positions within business analysis and finance control in organizations that have experienced rapid change, as the online casino provider Net Entertainment, the telco IP-Only, and the packaging recycler Svenska Returpack. His background also covers management consulting within KPMG, with a focus on IT-related change projects for organizations in both private and public sectors.

Hannes holds an MSc in Business and Economics and a BSc in Computer Science, both from the University of Uppsala.

The week starts with good news for Dutch affiliate marketers – One of Freespee’s largest affiliate network partners, Zanox, has launched the first Pay-Per-Call program in Netherlands.

Publishers, who previously had to decline programs with phone numbers because of  revenue leakage, can now accept call-based programs which conversions can be reliably attributed back to the publishers.

For each call, affiliate publishers will earn a nice commission of €11.15. [Program description in Dutch]

The advertiser, Centraal Beheer (part of the large insurance group Achmea) is a prime example of a company that instantly gets call advertising: They already have a strong call center operation in place, so why not utilize it fully and drive new customers through affiliate marketing?

Whether you are an ad network, advertiser or publisher, don’t hesitate to contact us to learn how Freespee can help you to get started with call advertising, Pay-Per-Call and CPA Phone Calls.

Today we are very happy and proud to introduce our latest team member:

Vanessa Wu – VP, Strategy & Affiliate Relations

Vanessa has long international career within advertising and strategy development. She joined Freespee after being responsible for Product Planning of Search, Maps, and Advertising business at Microsoft’s Windows Phone division. Prior to that, she worked at Google, HP, and McKinsey. She was the co-founder of a boutique media consulting firm in Asia, and her global clients include eBay, Acer, and other major telecom operators in the region. She studied management at Harvard University and holds an MBA from Boston University School of Management.

Warm welcome to the Freespee team Vanessa!

With these great news we would like to thank everyone for another record year for Freespee – and wish all our business partners, call advertisers and publishers Happy New Year 2012!

Making Phone Calls Count | Since 2008

Another day, another ad network relies on the Freespee call monetization platform to Make Phone Calls Count.

The Berlin, Germany based global CPA ad network Sponsormob is our first pure-mobile ad network partner. Mobile affiliate marketing is one of the fastest growing digital advertising spaces. Not all online affiliate programs fit perfectly on the mobile browser, but calls work better than ever on mobile – with Click-to-Call consumers get instant, one-click access to merchant’s call center, whenever and wherever they wish.

Using the Freespee API, mobile ad networks can now add Cost-Per-Action phone calls to their business model – calls have 10-20x higher value compared to CPC, and advertisers enjoy high sales conversion rates, on average 20-50% depending on the vertical and offer, as well as increased average order values.

Read more on our mutual press release below the diagram and contact us to get started today!

Press Release: Sponsormob Partners with Freespee, Offering CPA Click-to-Call to Clients in Germany

Freespee’s Founder & CEO Carl Holmquist will be speaking at the world’s largest affiliate marketing conference Affiliate Summit West (January 8-10, 2012).

The presentation will cover European perspective and success stories in affiliate, local and mobile advertising. Sessions details below – hope you can make it!

Sunday, January 8

CPA Phone Calls – Local Advertising Opportunity

Session 1c

Location: Emperors I
Time: 11:00am – 12:00pm

Three years ago we started Freespee. We were then a bunch of telecom geeks with a vision to give small businesses an insight into internet advertising on their own terms. What does that mean?

My neighbour at the time was a dentist, who took patient bookings over the telephone. But he could not buy internet advertising and make it pay for the number of telephone bookings received as a result of the advertisement. Hence, Cost-Per-Call. As a matter of fact, he did not even receive a report on how many calls resulted from the advertisement, even though it was the only way for customers to do business with him. At best he could buy a ‘Click Package’. He always found this difficult since he had no idea as to what it would give him.

Consequently, he continued to buy advertisements in the printed Yellow Pages. There, customers could only call him, so it felt right even if he did not know if he was getting any new customer calls that way either.

Now things are different for small business owners like him, and the Freespee team is on its way towards realising the vision. Lately, we have also reshaped the vision a little and made it easier to grasp.

Today Freespee introduces Calls as a Currency within internet advertising, as a compliment to Impressions and Clicks. In the space ofthree years we have managed to introduce this currency for internet advertising in 14 markets. In these times of financial unrest the Call currency is proving to be very strong. A price comparison site in the US that introduced calls as a currency for their advertisers saw a call price increase of 160% within the first ten days, right in the midst of the financial crisis.

In parallel, desktop browsing is moving to mobile browsing. For the last 12 months we are seeing extremely strong growth in the number of calls from internet advertising. In local mobile searches, according to Freespee’s statistics from 30,000 advertisers in 14 countries, there is one call for every two searches. On account of this, Google also joined the bandwagon a few weeks ago by beginning to offer Call bidding in AdWords. However, to begin with, this only works for advertisers in the US and the UK.

We are seeing a renaissance when it comes to inbound calls. It is now one of the strongest sales channels that previously had not been associated with internet advertising. Many companies have long been excluded from performance-based internet advertising (Cost-Per-Sales), due to their products being too complex for consumers to carry out their purchases online.

The travel industry is a typical example. Simple business trips are booked online, but how many family holidays with two adults, three children, hire-car, etc. are being booked online? Freespee is working with a number of affiliate networks that have been able to broaden their client base through introducing calls as a recognized currency, to the advantage of everybody.

Recently, a US price comparison site built its own Call bidding solution driven by the Freespee API. It took them two (2) days.

Learn more about benefits for Local Search, Affiliate Networks,Classified Publishers and Mobile Ad networks and contact us to include Calls in your business model!

We hereby introduce Analytics 1.6.3! This latest version of Freespee Analytics was released during Thursday night. Some of the cleverest night owls at Freespee worked through the darkest hours to put the new version into action.

Please have a look at our summary of the most important enhancements below. Don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions about this release.

Alternative answering numbers

In the past you’ve been limited to one answering number per source. This will change with Analytics 1.6.3! We’ve added a feature to give you the option to configure an advanced answering number matrix. Using this matrix, you may configure different answering numbers per weekday(s) and time of day. This brilliant new feature is of course also available through the API.

This feature is not activated by default. Talk to your sales contact if you want to get started with alternative answering numbers.

Features changing names

We felt that Click-for-number and Web numbers are quite similar – they are in fact dynamic. That’s why we are now changing the names of these features as described below.

Click-for-number >> Dynamic number, server side
Web number >> Dynamic number, client side

Lead notes gets enhanced with e-mail notifications

Commenting on leads and calls is a much-appreciated feature among advertisers who have started using it. To make it even better, we’ve added e-mail notifications. This means you’ll be notified if someone adds a note on a lead or call you’ve been commenting on – to keep you in the loop!

API + Voicemail = true

Voicemail greeting recording and voicemail settings on sources are now available in the API. There is also a change in the API’s statistics resources. We added paging to help keep the result sets at reasonable size.

To find out all the details concerning these changes, please request the latest API documentation from Helpdesk by logging into your account or by contacting us.

This is the big news we’ve been waiting for since Google launched Call Metrics for AdWords almost exactly a year ago.

Rolling out over the next weeks, AdWords advertisers in US and UK will be able to buy calls in addition to clicks from desktop search, just like advertisers on Freespee’s partnering ad networks have been able to for a while now. We expect Google to expand this offering to additional countries (including the 13 other Freespee countries) during 2012.

This is great news for us and for the performance marketing industry, as it opens up new opportunities for advertisers to acquire sales leads more efficiently by being able to bid for calls also on Google.

In Google’s announcement, an example price of $5 per call is given as equivalent value of $1 per click. The simple reason for this is that people who call are further ahead in the purchase funnel than those who click – people who often are just looking for information. According to our statistics, the value of a call can be as much as 10-20 times that of a click, depending largely on the type of product/service, country, demographics and campaign optimization.

We welcome our friends at Google in joining the successful ad networks and search engines to offer calls as advertising currency.

You can learn more from the Search Engine Land article by Greg Sterling (@gsterling).

Does your ad network monetize calls yet?

We are proud to announce a new strategic partner in Germany – mobile.international GmbH, owned by eBay.

Through the company’s AutoAct ad management system, Freespee’s call and leads management tools are now available to 36 000 car dealers who advertise on mobile.de and 22 other classified sites and car search engines AutoAct has direct access to.

Our platform is now fully integrated into AutoAct, making life easier for everyone – just how we like it!

Please see our press release below and contact us for more information!

Read the rest of the article!