We’re excited to introduce you to the first of our very own heroes – the smart and suave Mr Freeman, who with Freespee’s help experienced the magic of accurate data and thereby reaped the rewards of his mobile campaign. Enjoy this video and learn his story:

What makes this video so special for us is that it is actually based on the real story of one of our most devoted customers. The Swedish car rental company MABI Hyrbilar had gone through the same pain as Mr Freeman did, before they came across Freespee who helped them to embrace their mobile marketing efforts and achieve success:

‘In the car rental business a lot of potential customers prefer to call before making up their mind, so analyzing those conversions is of crucial importance for us,’ says Ronnie Brodin, MABI’s marketing director. ‘We’d been looking for a smart way to do it and discovered Freespee. It has become a real eye-opener for us, demonstrating, loud and clear, which marketing channels are driving us calls and, in the long run, sales. Armed with Freespee data, we concentrated more heavily on specific channels, such as Google Adwords, Facebook, hitta.se, mabi.se and as a result our customer acquisition costs has lowered significantly. We’re thrilled by the results and will in the future rely on Freespee in our ad spending.’

Stay tuned for more Freespee stories and videos as well as other great things which we have lined up for the next couple of months!

We have reached a major milestone: Over 10 million calls - realtime conversations between buyers and sellers – have gone through Freespee and added value to our advertisers, publisher and partner networks.

It’s time to celebrate!!
Out of the 15 countries we are  live in, advertisers in the UK, Sweden, Denmark and Netherlands can now sign-up for Freespee Analytics directly at www.freespee.com – we are working hard to add more countries very soon! If you are a publisher, ad network or large advertiser that receives hundreds or thousands of calls per day, you can contact us to get started right away.

Why Freespee Analytics? We enable advertisers to analyze calls from any advertising source – especially now with the exponential growth of mobile advertising, click-to-call can be the most cost efficient way of getting more sales leads and driving revenue growth. Without call tracking and analytics, your marketing efforts are like a black hole, whenever the customer prefers contacting by phone.

Try it yourself! We also offer a completely free version to track calls from smartphone browsers. Getting started takes 5 minutes, just register and add the tracking code to your site!

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?

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!

The proven business model for directories, or local search as it’s often called in the online world, has for a long time been to list all the applicable businesses for free, and charge for value-added services such as increased visibility. For this, you need loads of people calling every single business owner and convince them to become a paying customer.

Right? Actually, no. What you need is intelligent analysis of your listings and potential customers. Contact only the businesses which already benefit from your traffic – and multiply their success. Web analytics is good for this. But call tracking is much better, as local search is all about the phone calls.

With local search thriving (over 4 million businesses have already confirmed their listing on Google Places), vertical search sites have become very popular, as they have been able to concentrate on a single category – such as restaurants.

Today we are happy to announce partnership with restaurant booking site 5pm.co.uk – and at the same time our first media customer in the United Kingdom. 5pm is a great place to go to, when you want to look for the nearest restaurant, read reviews, find deals and book a table for free.

With Freespee, 5pm.co.uk is able to reach for their most potential customers and help them to fill their restaurants. Simple as that.

You can find more information on our mutual press release.

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…

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!

Lately we have received increasing number of requests from search advertising firms and ad networks to provide a call tracking solution for sponsored link and performance campaigns. Last year according IAB, search advertising spend in Europe totalled 6,7 Billion euros, or 45,8% of total internet ad spend.

In most cases, the advertisers only paid for the actual clicks, which is great. The problem is, that the ad displays and clicks to the landing pages also generated millions of calls to the advertisers – calls that nobody got accounted for.

Actually, not even the advertisers knew, where the calls came from. Many advertisers who live or die for the incoming calls (think about auto, real estate, telecom, medical, banking, finance, insurance, professional services, etc.), probably spent much less in search advertising than they should have, as they didn’t know how many calls those campaigns generated.

Freespee Analytics will change all that. Using virtual numbers on each advertising campaign and landing page, advertisers can now see exactly, where the calls originate from, and how much each lead cost them.

To make this as simple as possible, we have decided to partner with ad networks and search platform providers. We are proud to announce our first partner – adX Search – whose platform enables advertisers to have a single point of entry to all major search engines.

For more information, please read our partnership announcement.

Interested in adding Call Tracking to your platform or ad network? There’s an API for that. Please contact us to get started.

Today we our announcing the launch of Freespee Analytics in Finland with two pilot partners, media agency Dagmar and online analytics specialist Snoobi.

This is also an important milestone for Freespee, as our new Freespee Analytics application is now available for a wider advertiser and marketer audience through media agency and analytics partners.

During the trials Freespee Analytics was used for example by a major telecom operator for their B2B marketing campaign: A Freespee Number was attached to print ads in a dozen of the leading business magazines and newspapers, which enabled both the media agency and the advertiser to measure the incoming calls received from these ads.

Going forward they can optimize the campaigns by selecting the medias that work the best, page numbers, call-to-action wording and number placements in the ads – information that is extremely valuable for any advertiser!

You can read our full press release on CisionWire in English or in Finnish. The story was already picked up by the leading advertising industry publication in Finland, Markkinointi & Mainonta.