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.

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!”

Hope you’ve been enjoying the summer as much as we have! Since May, Freespee has initiated over 1 million live conversations from potential customers to large and small businesses in Europe and North America.

We are seeing extremely fast growth in mobile Click-to-Call traffic from search and display advertising. During the fall we are ramping up our marketing communications, opening several new sales and software development positions and spending more time where the advertisers and publishers are.

Want to learn more about the call traffic from your ad listings, mobile applications and campaigns?

Contact us to book appoint at advertising and marketing industry events:

dmexco | Cologne, Germany

September 12-13

EASDP Congress | Toledo, Spain

September 19-21

ad:tech | London, UK

September 19-20

Apps World | London, UK

October 2-3

a4uexpo | London, UK

October 16-17

The Mobile Show | London UK

Mobile Advertising World & Planet of the Apps

October 17-18

Read also:

Freespee introduces a web widget for live customer conversations

Freespee’s Mobile Tracking SDK enables call tracking from apps without changing phone numbers

What’s the biggest pain facing performance advertisers and publishers driving sales leads from digital advertising?

Increasingly, the answer we hear is ‘conversion rate’ – the number of visitors who convert or take an action after clicking to your site.

As marketing guru Seth Godin puts it, in many cases this rate is 1% - Luckily, this is something marketers can directly affect.

With the new Freespee Callback Widget you can witness your web traffic conversion rate double and customer satisfaction skyrocket!

Here’s how it works:

1. A simple script is installed on any desktop or mobile website.
2. Website visitors will now see a green phone symbol on the right-hand side of your site – just like the feedback button many websites have on the left-hand side.
3. In addition to user-actions, the Callback Widget can be automatically triggered to open by an event on your site or after a timer has run out – suiting perfectly to those most common drop-off pages.
4. The visitor will get the ability to get their questions answered by a real life person, without any cost to them.

What happens after that? On the selected time, Freespee initiates a call to the advertiser and then connects the advertiser directly to the visitor’s phone. Once the script is installed, everything happens automagically and the visitor gets the information they need whenever they need it.

That’s customer service!

Test it yourself on www.freespee.com and contact us to get started!

Midsummer (‘midsommar’ in Swedish, ‘juhannus’ in Finnish) is the second most important holiday in the Nordic & Baltic countries, celebrated with family and friends at summer cottages, festivals or at Scandinavian Islands, the world’s largest archipelago. Today at Uppsala latitude we are enjoying 22 hours and 14 min of daylight – and 24 hours when going up north a bit more..

Freespee team will chill out for this long weekend, but we’ll be back on Monday with product updates and big news coming up soon.

We would like to wish everyone happy Midsummer!

We are happy to announce a new partnership with the leading affiliate network from Netherlands, Daisycon. The company is Freespee’s first partner in France and Belgium, where we are developing our business by providing large service industry advertisers and independent affiliates, as well as major publishers, ways to significantly improve online marketing performance with phone call conversions from new customers.

Please find more information on our mutual press releases in English and Dutch. Advertisers and affiliates interested in launching new programs which combine online and offline conversions can contact Daisycon directly.

In the area of performance based online marketing, Daisycon has played a pioneering role for over ten years; leading to having a significant position when it comes to affiliate marketing and lead generation. With more than 70.000 active websites and 1.700 ongoing campaigns daily, Daisycon is the largest Dutch affiliate network, and it has it’s ambitions: Daisycon is currently offering her services in four markets: The Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and France.

With several significant acknowledgements and awards, Daisycon is one of the most commended organisations in this technology driven industry. Smart features such as real time statistics and the advanced conversion tracking tools make Daisycon a competitive player internationally. With about 75 specialist on board, Daisycon is striving to keep pushing the boundries of performance based online marketing and keep innovating its time-tested stable and reliable network.

More information in Dutch, German, French and English.

We are rolling! Freespee just recently passed 5 million calls – sales leads delivered to large and small advertisers all across Europe and U.S.

The counter for calls is ticking faster than ever, and at the same time advertisers are more aware of inbound call value, which is currently ranging from 5€ to 40€ – very competitive compared to any media pricing!

We could have not accomplished this alone – thanks to our business partners, Freespee continues on the right growth trajectory. We also sign new partners all the time, and I would like to introduce the following new ones:

Cologne, Germany -based search engine optimization and marketing firm

Social search with trusted reviews for local companies in Sweden

Performance based SEM and social media agency based in Uppsala, Sweden

One of the most successful call advertising applications using the Freespee API has been adding service offerings (think insurance, finance, telecom, utilities, etc.) to traditional price comparison websites, which mostly still offer physical products like electronics.

Even if the price comparison site already include these offerings, adding monetizable phone number will improve the conversion rate tremendously, because people rarely buy these services using online forms, but rather call!

There are two ways for price comparison website publishers to learn more about how they could benefit reaching new types of advertisers and optimizing the value of their traffic.

1. Download the business case study (please enter your email address to access the PDF file)

2. See the example code in Freespee Developer tools

Even though the business case study demonstrates a U.S. example, this works perfectly in Europe as well! Please contact us if you have any questions or would like to get started.