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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Case: IGIA

Search engine marketing, both paid and organic search, is obviously one of the most important areas in digital marketing today, and as such a focus area for developing the Freespee Analytics platform as well.

Together with Guava (part of the French Netbooster Group) we are testing a simple tracking code for an advertiser’s site to show a different Freespee Number (local, trackable number) depending of from where the user comes to the site. This enables networks, agencies and the advertisers see the call traffic by source on Freespee Analytics.

As an example, we take a local small business in our hometown Uppsala, a company called IGIA. They offer naprapathy therapy treatment, and their marketing is based on both word-of-mouth and people coming to their website from various online sources.

IGIA has been using Google Analytics to see online traffic, but haven’t been able to tell, if for example the person who called them and booked an appointment clicked on AdWords ad before, or used a local search engine. They also don’t want to go through the trouble of creating separate landing pages for each visitor source.

So, what they did instead is that they put a Freespee Analytics tracking code on their site. This code displays a different phone number to the web visitor, depending on which source they come from. You can try it yourself, by first clicking on the search links, and then clicking on the igia.se link on the results.

Direct traffic – phone number: 018- 843 40 40

bing.com organic search: 018-843 40 41

hitta.se local search: 018-843 40 42

maps.google.se local search (a.k.a. Google Places): 018-843 40 45

google.com organic search: 018-843 40 47

eniro.se local search: 018-843 40 48

Google AdWords: 018-843 40 49

You can have as many Freespee Numbers as you want, the cost increase is very small. When you get a lot of traffic in one of the channels, such as Google AdWords, you may want to dig in deeper and start tracking different keywords and ad copies. Freespee Analytics scales from a very small business to hundreds of thousands of tracking numbers.

Call tracking and analysis also answers many other questions: If you want to maximize the numbers of calls, is your number easy to find? Is the call-to-action on your ad good? Does offering a 15% discount make people call much more? Is your paid-for campaign targeted to the right people, at the right place, on the right time?

Simple A/B testing will tell you, however online advertising optimization can sometimes get quite complicated, that’s why we have agency partners to do the work for the advertisers.

Just ask, if they can already do phone call analysis for you!

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During the last two weeks we attended two great digital advertising industry events, dmexco in Cologne and ad:tech in London. While dmexco had impressive American-style booths and excessive catering, ad:tech was more modest but still jam-packed.

Both however proved one thing right: Performance advertising and affiliate Ad Networks are thriving.

Freespee has so far concentrated mostly on Online Directories (local search engines), Classifieds and Media Agencies, but with the recent release of the Freespee Analytics API 1.3 we have now started to work with all kinds of digital advertising companies, who like to integrate call tracking and analysis into their platforms.

As we know, the Advertisers love Freespee Analytics, because it brings transparency to the phone call sources and enables tracking of incoming phone leads without any investments to their telephone systems. Based on dozens of excellent meetings at the trade shows, here’s a list of the most important things other people look for when partnering with Freespee:

Ad Networks (CPC/CPM)

“Our advertisers do not currently know, how much phone call traffic we generate for them. We’d like to include the number of calls to our campaign reporting in order to prove the complete value and Return On Investment to the advertisers.”

Affiliate Ad Networks (CPL/CPA)

“Our campaigns are generating thousands of phone calls, which we cannot yet track or monetize. Removing phone numbers from landing pages is the worst possible “solution”: In industries where calls are important (like insurance, cars, real estate, premium travel, etc.) the users will not convert, but walk away.”

Direct Marketing (Email, SMS, other)

“Trackable phone numbers can be added to emails or SMS messages themselves, or to the landing pages. Now we can show that we bring a lot more leads to the advertisers than they think.”

Mobile Ad Networks

“We would like to include calls to our reporting and create new Click-to-Call ad units. Through the API, we get the full details of the calls: Time and date, length of the call, and whether it was answered or not. More and more people are using their phones to search for local companies, and then call them to book appointments, reserve tables or just ask how long the store is open.”

Publishers

“The ads on our site generate thousands of phone calls and tens of thousands of euros in incremental profits to the advertisers. We believe we deserve to get credited for their success. Also, if the advertisers would know how many calls they get from our site, they would spend a lot more on the ads.”

Search Agencies (SEO/SEM)

“We get the full picture of the web traffic only by adding phone call tracking to the visitors’ web funnel.” — Did you know that using Freespee Analytics with a tracking code, you can see from which search engine or ad campaign the user came to the site and then made a phone call? We will soon tell more about the work we do together with Guava.

Web Analytics

“Using our analytics tool, the publishers know every little detail of the web site traffic – however, they miss out on one very important thing: The number of phone calls originating from the website. By using Freespee Analytics API, we can add the number of phone calls besides the data for visitors, page views and clicks. Finally our customers get the full picture.”

See the photos from the events on our Facebook Page wall!

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Last weekend we reached an awesome milestone – the Freespee voice platform has mediated 1 000 000 calls!

What does this actually mean? It may not be a big number compared to all voice calls made in the world, but consider this:

• Many of those calls would have not been made without Freespee. Our partners, such as Blocket.se, are building web-based voice apps, which allow consumers to sell products online more efficiently: In the past over 50% of calls were missed. Using Freespee Numbers on ads, the sellers can easily filter out other unknown callers and answer only to the people who want to buy their product.

• Advertisers can measure calls to Freespee Numbers as easily as clicks. Now you know, where the calls come from and you can optimize your advertising budget accordingly. Login to Freespee Analytics and see when you receive calls, from which sources and how many calls are missed. If you like, you can also integrate your existing CRM, web analytics or ad serving platform using our API to fully automate your call tracking.

That’s it – a voice call is now as simple as an e-mail or a click.

Next milestone: One Billion calls.

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This week the Freespee team is excited to introduce two new professionals – Daniel Johansson and Tobias Karlsson. Tobias, who has background in enterprise software, will be leading our immediate expansion to Germany, whereas Daniel, an IP telecom professional, will take responsibility of overall sales in Europe. Welcome guys!

We are also welcoming you to join our team of happy troopers! These two new positions just opened up – feel free to spread the word and if interested in applying yourself, please do so as soon as possible.

Lead Developer – Location: Uppsala *NEW!*
Web Developer – Location: Uppsala
Commercial Manager – Location: Uppsala, Cologne, Helsinki or London
Product Marketing Manager – Location: Uppsala

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Why are new marketing tools and techniques spreading like wildfire? Because if they are truly revolutionary, they provide companies a strong competitive edge which anyone simply cannot afford to miss.

Today we are announcing our latest major deal in Sweden – with a Schibsted company Hitta.se, a local search engine or business directory service, if you will. This means, that in addition to Eniro, Lokaldelen and DinDel, also Hitta.se advertisers can benefit from our call tracking solution Freespee Analytics.

For more information, please read our Hitta.se announcement. If you’d like to know how to get started with call tracking, register here and we will get back to you soon!

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