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.

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

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!

Just less than a year ago we started to explore new opportunities for our call advertising solution outside Local Search and Classified businesses.

Today we are very happy to announce Affiliate Window (UK) and buy.at (U.S. & UK) from the Digital Window group as new Freespee partners – and at the same time our expansion to the U.S. market.

In a very early phase we learned, that many big national advertisers were also dependent on calls as advertising currency – however, in performance advertising the Affiliate Networks were reluctant to include phone numbers in campaigns and for a valid reason: Phone numbers meant revenue leakage for the ad network and its publishers. Other way around, in call-intensive verticals those merchants were not able attract the most lucrative affiliates.

The new industry sector brought us also technical challenges: How to reliably track and attribute the caller from the landing page to the right affiliate, all the way to click level? How about billing, commission payments and real-time bidding and reporting? Last but not least, how to automatically determine commission level in CPA, based on the actual value of the transaction made over the phone?

During the year we have developed a solution together with some of the largest Affiliate Networks in the Europe. They join our cause of giving consumers the freedom of choice and Making Phone Calls Count for the online advertising industry.

Please see our joint Press Release belo for further information.

Affiliate Window and buy.at Team Up with Freespee for Next Generation Global Pay-Per-Call Solution

Yesterday was a big day for us and our partners. Leading Ad networks in Europe, powered by the Freespee Pay-Per-Call platform, had in co-operation with their publishers generated 2 million phone leads to their advertisers.

In some cases the calls were generated in 100% Pay-Per-Call driven campaigns, but in most cases the Calls were a complement to an existing Online CPA/CPL model, in order to monetize 100% of the traffic and eliminate the revenue leakage. The CPL value of a call starts at 3 EUR and can go as high as 100 EUR in some businesses, as real estate, car test drives etc.

In travel, up to 80% of the consumers prefer to close the deal by phone. If an Online Ad network does not add Pay-Per-Call to their CPA/CPL business model, they leak 80% of their revenue in worst case.

This morning we released a new look and a new structure for our website.

Why?

Over the last 12 months or so, our customers have been telling us, “When we meet you, we finally understand the power of the platform and what value you can bring to us. Previously we had thought you were just another Click-To-Call provider…”

In other words, we hadn’t been communicating very well what we do. The good thing is that we have had a magnificent year nevertheless:

1. The team has doubled in size

2. The number of customers has tripled in size

3. Our monthly recurring revenue has increased by 400%

From the moment the Internet began to emerge as a powerful marketing channel, it became possible to measure impact in ways that had never before been possible.  Today companies devote serious resources to tracking visitors and measuring the number of actual orders or purchases generated by an Online campaign.

Being able to see the specific Click path that ultimately led your customers to complete an order on your site should be an excellent basis for knowing how to allocate your Online advertising budget. It would mean that you can make greater investments in keywords that have proven to be successful and ditch the words that don’t generate any results.

1. Sounds simple?

Think again: For 9 of 10 companies, a large proportion of the visits to their website do not result in a completed order or purchase because the viewer chooses instead to call the company. It might be to book a hotel room, or make an appointment with the chiropractor, or buy an airline ticket that was difficult to purchase Online, etc. Thus, the ability to be able to track incoming sales calls and relate them to the viewers’ Internet search is absolutely crucial.

If you use a search word that, according to your report, attracts a lot of visitors but leads to no completed orders in your Webshop, you will probably stop putting money into that word. But what if you knew that this specific search word was generating 8 of your 10 incoming sales calls – would you still make the same decision? And imagine you’re a dentist who makes all the appointments over the phone? How do you benefit by knowing how many people visited your Website after an SEM campaign?

2. Doesn’t everyone measure their incoming sales calls, just like they measure the number of visitors to their website?

No, almost no one does that!

Why? Because the analysis industry has been revolutionized by Online marketing. And people in the industry tend to think that it’s really painstaking to have to measure calls. The 25-year olds at Media agency X ask themselves, “Who calls these days?”

Freespee has gathered significant statistics over the course of two years, in which we clearly show the correlation between calls and Online search words, just as companies already relate their search words to a finished deal in the Web shop. As a teaser, when Google changed the look and feel of Google Places on October 28^th, 300% more calls are placed directly from Google search results. Prior to October 28^th, the user clicked though to the web site and then placed the call. Expect dramatic increase in call volume in 2011.

As there are millions of calls per day, the Media Agency should ask themselves if they monetize this?

In five years, the advertising industry will be entirely different from what I describe above. By then, companies that measure visitor traffic should also be able to clearly see the correlation to their call traffic. Otherwise, Freespee will have failed in its mission.

PS. Next time I will tell you a little bit more about the increased number of Voice leads from Google places…

This spring, we attended the ICMA conference in Berlin. Since then, we have added several classified search services to our list of customer. They all use the Freespee call tracking and Pay-Per-Call platform for the same purpose, to prove and fully monetize their Ad inventory.

This time, ICMA is in Vienna, and Freespee is there. The typical B2C classified service use the Freespee API to embed our services. In the picture below, you see an example where a local phone number and SMS notification services are ordered and provisioned in real time using the API.

If you find this interesting, go to Vienna and look for Juhani, he will introduce you to how easy it is to start count calls.

Since yesterday we have one more guru in smart coding among us, Villu Türnpuu. If there is something Villu does not know about handling extreme amounts of transactions, it’s not worth knowing.

He used to manage the transaction platform of one of the largest Online financial brokers in the Nordics. But since yesterday he’s with us!