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

 

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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

 

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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?

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The event season is kicking off again! It almost feels like during autumn there are only a couple of weeks when you should organize any kind of event… Certainly during the next week it feels like that.

Please join us at the events for a cup of coffee – it will be fun!

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eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit

Stockholm, Sweden 19-20 September | Running parallel with Search Marketing Expo – SMX Stockholm

15% discount code: INUSEINSIGHTS011

Freespee’s CEO Carl Holmquist will give a speech about Capturing the offline phone conversion on Day 2 (Sep 20th) at 15:30pm.

Meeting contact: daniel.johansson at freespee.com

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ad:tech London 2011 [Free Expo!]

London, 21-22 September

Freespee’s Chris Shields will be speaking about CPA Phone Calls on Day 1 at 10:30am.

Meeting contact: chris.shields at freespee.com

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dmexco [Free!]

Digital Marketing Exposition & Conference

Cologne, Germany 21-22 September

Meeting contact: tobias.karlsson at freespee.com

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EADP Congress 2011

Dublin, Ireland 21-23 September

European Association of Directory and Database Publishers

Meeting contact: carsten.gildum at freespee.com

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a4uexpo London 2011

London (Hilton Metropole) 18-19 October 2011

Freespee is once again sponsoring the event. Early Bird rate will end September 19th – 10% discount code FREESPEEVIP

Meeting contact: juhani.polkko at freespee.com

 

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We recommend following us on our other social media channels as well:

At Freespee we obviously keep track on our focus markets intensively – but why stop there? We believe in freedom of speech (that’s where the name comes from!) and want to share some of the interesting and publicly available information to our partners and the rest of the industry.

Follow us at www.twitter.com/freespee to learn more! Even if you don’t have a Twitter account yet, you can bookmark the page and follow the links to the articles.

 

LinkedIn has become our most efficient recruiting channel. We also encourage everybody at Freespee to link their personal profiles to the company page – even though it’s up to each individual.

You can also follow Freespee on LinkedIn by clicking Follow Company on Freespee’s LinkedIn page to learn about job opportunities and new people joining the company. Maybe you already know someone from the team?

 

Facebook has become more and more important for businesses, even though it’s still more “unofficial” media for most people. We also like to use it for more relaxed things, like uploading photos from events and posting things that don’t fit well to other channels.

You can find Freespee’s Facebook Page at www.facebook.com/freespee

Last but not least, don’t forget that you can follow this blog through the RSS feed by using tools like the Google Reader.

 

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Freespee was one of the sponsors of a4uexpo Europe this week in Munich, Germany. This is the leading event for the affiliate and performance marketing industry and was attended by around 800 senior marketing professionals from all across Europe.

While in the U.S. Pay-Per-Call advertising is pretty advanced in affiliate networks, Europe lacks behind a bit – however, we are in an evaluation period with many of the largest European networks and the response from both publishers and advertisers has been very good.

Pictures from the event coming soon to our Facebook Page. If you’d like to learn more about our solution and become a Freespee affiliate network partner, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

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Oikotie.fi is an online marketplace for cars, real-estate and jobs in Finland. The site has 410 000 weekly unique visitors and is part of the Sanoma News business unit. The Sanoma group operates in 20 European countries and has close to 20 000 employees.

Problem

Oikotie.fi offers many ways for the consumers to reach the advertiser when they have found the perfect car. Because of the nature of the business, most buyers prefer calling the car dealer immediately and make an appointment for a test drive.

While online leads have been measurable and easy to report to the advertisers, earlier it was not possible to measure the amount of phone calls – so the car dealerships were not aware of the total number of leads Oikotie.fi generated and thus unable to accurately calculate the advertising ROI.

Of course, this a more generic problem for the car advertisers – they spend marketing money in several channels, but cannot fully measure the results. At the same time, the car dealers continue to miss as many as 15-30% of the customers calls from advertising channels. According to Freespee’s statistics, Online Click-to-Call (i.e. call-back) wasn’t a viable option either, as it’s not trusted by most consumers who rather call local phone numbers.

Solution

In order to resolve the issues, Sanoma partnered with Freespee for a full solution:

A) Call metrics were integrated into the monthly reporting by using local call tracking phone numbers (or “metered lines”) on Oikotie.fi with the Freespee API

B) A notification email is now sent to the advertiser immediately after each missed call that originates from Oikotie.fi (SMS also available). The notification includes the caller’s phone number, so that the car dealer can instantly call back to the prospect.

C) Freespee Analytics web application is offered to all car dealerships with a small monthly fee. Using the application, the advertisers can measure and manage phone leads from any advertising channel, including online, print, TV and outdoor. The default package includes 5 Freespee Numbers to be used in advertisements, and missed call notifications as well as call traffic analysis is enabled in all channels. The advertisers get their own login to Freespee’s intuitive web interface.

More info about Freespee’s solutions for B2C and B2B Classifieds: http://www.freespee.com/classifieds

Join us at ICMA in Nice, France next week!

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Local advertising is booming – in the U.S., the business is expected to grow from $21.7 billion last year to $42.5 billion by 2015, according to BIA/Kelsey – that’s 14.4% compound annual growth rate (CAGR).

The reasons for the growth are the same in Europe: new technologies enable new types of services, which then allow consumers to find, call and visit local merchants easier and faster, compare prices and buy offline services online (i.e. the “daily deals” business). More and more companies are adopting performance based pricing, which lowers the bar for merchants to spend more on advertising, as they can easily control the spending to sustain a positive ROI.

Many people within the industry are asking, what is Google doing about this?

The answer is that they are doing a lot. But what we are interested in is the phone call traffic – as local advertising is all about offline leads and transactions.

Google speaks about two offerings – in addition to Google Voice – which are available only in the U.S. market.

1. Mobile Click-To-Call (CTC)

Mobile Click-To-Call – as opposed to Online CTC (rather, “Call Back”) – is an intuitive and natural way of connecting directly with merchants and stores. The end user simple clicks a link/button and makes a call. From the merchants’ point of view this is great, as they don’t need to have mobile landing pages – Mobile CTC works directly from an ad.

How to measure the amount of call traffic then? While it is possible to register and report the number of clicks, without call tracking you can’t tell how many calls were connected. When you are paying for the advertising, this can make a huge difference.

Google launched CTC for local advertising in January 2010 and expanded it to national advertisers couple of months later.

And the results? They were simply blown away. Early this year Google announced, that their advertisers receive millions of calls per month and 200% higher CTRs.

2. AdWords Call Metrics

Still the majority of people search for local merchants with their computers online – and of course search advertising is a great way to drive call traffic.

In November 2010 Google finally launched call measurements on AdWords – Call Metrics. While it’s still available only to a limited number of advertisers – and only in the U.S. – it proves that Google wants to be where many of our partners already are today.

What’s in it for me?

Whenever you pick up the phone to call a car dealer, real-estate agent, insurance company or a restaurant, think how great it is to get a human being to serve you and gets things done instantly. Think how valuable your business is to the merchant.

Every time you see a phone number ask yourself, does that advertiser know how many calls they receive through the ad? Is the media publisher or the ad network able to prove the media value,  including phone leads?

How much is your call traffic worth?

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Building an ecosystem almost from scratch can be tough. How do you reach your audience and build the long-term buzz, without losing your focus on signing new partners in the short term?

At Freespee, we have undertaken a number of highly targeted marketing exercises to raise awareness about the company – but also, more importantly, about the importance and value of phone calls in the Lead Generation business. Events have proven to be very efficient, in terms of either sponsoring, exhibiting at or simply attending them. In just two days, you may be able to speak to over 100 companies in your target audience, in addition to the prearranged meetings.

When operating as a startup in the intersection of the advertising, media and telecom/technology industries, it’s not easy to select the events to focus on. In fact, we haven’t been able even to find a directory of relevant (and reputable!) events in Europe. So we created our own “long-list” calendar – and want to share it with you! The calendar focuses on lead generation, performance advertising, media/publishing and major digital start-up events, and we have excluded (for example) creative industry events.

You can subscribe to this “Freespee Events” calendar in XML or iCal format – or just simply access it directly in your browser in HTML (you can optionally add it to your Google Calendar with the link in the bottom right corner).

You can find a link to each event’s website in its Description field. The location (city) is included in the title, so you can see the locations at a glance.

As you can see, there are many types of events, from very broad to very focused ones. The list is by no means complete – feel free to suggest new events, and important local (national) events are especially welcome! You can contact me directly to suggest events at: juhani.polkko (at) freespee.com.

We have decided to attend at least the following events, and hope to see you there!

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Technology for Marketing & Advertising is a large event held in London on March 1–2 (next week!). They expect over 10,000 visitors. There are two sub-events: Online Advertising & Affiliate Expo and Publishing Expo.

Contact Hanna Olsson to set up a meeting.

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The biannual International Classifieds Media Association (ICMA) event “Classifieds: Recipes for success” is organised this time in Nice, France on April 27–30. Freespee is sponsoring this executive-level conference, which has proven to be very valuable for us in the past.

Contact Juhani Polkko to set up a meeting.

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European Association of Directory and Database Publishers (EADP) focuses on the industry which is under major restructuring. They have two executive-level events, EADP Conference “Mobile and Social El Dorado” on May 12–13 in Malta, and EADP Congress in September.

Contact Carsten Gildum to set up a meeting.

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vdav is an event focused on directory publishers in German-speaking countries, and is held in Berlin on May 24–26.

Contact Tobias Karlsson to set up a meeting (Wir sprechen Deutsch!).

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a4uexpo focuses on the over €10 billion affiliate and performance marketing industry. The next conference will be held in Münich on June 7–8.

Contact Juhani Polkko to set up a meeting.

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If all this buzz about Call Tracking, Call Metrics, Call Analytics, etc. gets you confused, you are not alone. As with any other emerging technology, the terminology for Call Tracking  is constantly developing.

Freespee focuses on helping our partners to track, prove and monetize the phone call traffic through various advertising channels. As the European leader in the industry (18 000+ advertisers trust us to power their inbound call marketing) we are trying to find the right words to describe what we do, in order to make it clear to everybody.

So here we go, definitions:

Call Tracking – Measuring inbound phone call traffic from various sources

• This is the most widely used term to describe, how many phone calls an online or print listing, campaign or website generates – or from the advertisers’ point of view, answer the question: Where do the calls come from?

• When Freespee talks about Call Tracking, in the same breath we always remind people that this has actually existed for a long time – however, a modern Call Tracking platform is cloud-based and allows real-time number allocation and provisioning, operator-grade call mediation and connectivity, as well as a full API to integrate with various content and ad-management systems, marketing performance dashboards, and CRM software.

Call Metrics – Call statistics from a single source

• Typical statistics include total number of calls (by hour of the day, day of the week), average call length and the ratio of answered/missed calls.

• A term made popular by Google with their launch of AdWords Call Metrics in November 2010 – allowing advertisers to get statistics on how many phone calls an AdWords ad unit generates.

Call Analytics – Complete picture of call traffic

• Call Analytics is less common term, as it has a different meaning in the call center and telecom industries. In inbound call marketing, what we mean by Call Analytics is that it’s like web analytics but for calls. This includes tracking calls from multiple sources, advanced call metrics and phone leads information – such as measuring the number of unique callers, their geographical origin, displaying the phone numbers of the callers, analyzing the phone lead quality and identifying answering patterns to increase sales conversion rates.

• In call center business Call Analytics can also mean recording of calls, and the analysis of voice data itself – either by automatic transcriptions or manually listening – to find out qualitative information such as inquiry details or consumer sentiments. We are seeing this type of analysis coming to cloud-based platforms as well.

Now, what does the big picture look like, and what does the Freespee platform offer?

Do you like the terminology? Want to share your opinion? Join the discussion on Quora!

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