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!

We are proud to announce a new strategic partner in Germany – mobile.international GmbH, owned by eBay.

Through the company’s AutoAct ad management system, Freespee’s call and leads management tools are now available to 36 000 car dealers who advertise on mobile.de and 22 other classified sites and car search engines AutoAct has direct access to.

Our platform is now fully integrated into AutoAct, making life easier for everyone – just how we like it!

Please see our press release below and contact us for more information!

Read the rest of the article!

With a lot of updates and exciting new features, the Freespee development team is proud to present Freespee Analytics version 1.6. We have summarized the most important enhancements below. Please don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions about this release (info at freespee.com).

Freespee Analytics 1.6 ads new valuable features to our Local Search and Classifieds partners and their SME advertisers:

We are proud to let you know that we provide Swedens largest classified site blocket.se with temporary ad phone numbers.

The advertisers at blocket.se can use a temporary phone number in their ad, which is perfect for those who would have chosen to completely hide their phone number.
By showing a temporary phone number in the ad the advertisers chances of getting the item sold increases, but the real numbers still remain hidden. Calls are connected to the advertisers regular home or mobile phone, and no calls are connected between 11 pm to 7 am.

» Learn more about the Blocket.se case!

…Can be quite fun. We are just preparing a spontaneous Monday evening party for our friends and families. Why?

One of the largest and most successful Classified media publishers, Blocket.se, went live with a Voice application driven by the Freespee Voice API the other day.

From now on, any Blocket customer can use the built in Voice application to set the rules for incoming calls for their Advert (press release). In addition, their privacy is protected.

Freespee makes Voice as simple and comfortable as email.

I am happy to announce that Freespee will bring our next generation Call Analytics solution to European directory publishers at the EADP conference in Palma de Mallorca.

We have successfully expanded our reach in Europe and we are currently working with four of the leading directory groups, in eight!! different countries.

Being at Palma de Mallorca (lovely conditions for Swedes…) enables us to meet with our European customers and introduce our next generation Call Analytics solution. Freespee Analytics 1.5 is the result of our experience in running large scale traffic visualization solutions for some of the biggest directory publishers for two years, with 0 minutes downtime.

We plan to launch in at least two additional European countries over the next two months, offering Call Analytics solutions to directory publishers, B2C classifieds and media agencies that all work with phone savvy business.

One of our customers thought we should attend the ICMA conference , this year in Berlin. So now Hanna and Juhani are there.

ICMA is a community for the classified media industry. We already have some classified media customers who have built their own Voice applications by using the Freespee API, which all have been very successful.

Hence, we very much look forward to this conference, and their voice casts at Talky.se.

A leading classified service in the Nordics is now live with our Freespee People application since a couple of weeks. And we are in the middle of the launch process with a couple of the biggest brands in the industry.

How we got here in just 16 months I don’t know, propably it is the 2 years of coffee and coding during late nighthours before that!

I will be able to tell you where to go on the net in just a few weeks from now.

“A fraudster put out Johan’s apartment for rental at a large classified service” was the headline yesterday in Sweden’s largest newspaper Aftonbladet.

The classified service had troubles in tracking the fraudster since he/she used a temporary mail address in the advertisement. According to the police they receive about 30 similar cases a month.

Eniro has implemented the Freespee privacy protection service in their classified service. Hence, their advertisers receive privacy protection, but not by opening up for Fraud. Instead, that door is closed, forever. More Classified partners are about to be disclosed later on this year, which is good for the consumer. Our ambition is to remove fraud and uncertainty from Online sales.

It has been a great summer with lots of time for my family and our third child that was born in July. As we didn’t have a stroller that suited our new needs I had to sell the one we had and buy us another one.

I used 2 of the biggest sites for classifieds in Sweden, Blocket.se and Eniro.se. In both my advertisement I used Freespee numbers, one number for each Ad. Criminals could not track the numbers to our physical address.

The stroller was sold within 7 days and ALL potential buyers contacted me for a voice conversation. I didn’t recieve a single mail. After the deal I paused my Freespee numbers. No more late calls again asking for the stroller 1 week after it was sold. Hence, advertisers that do not invite buyers to place a call dramatically lowers the probability to sell their item.