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!
CPA Phone Calls – Local Advertising Opportunity
Session 1c
Location: Emperors I
Time: 11:00am – 12:00pm
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 hereby introduce Analytics 1.6.3! This latest version of Freespee Analytics was released during Thursday night. Some of the cleverest night owls at Freespee worked through the darkest hours to put the new version into action.
Please have a look at our summary of the most important enhancements below. Don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions about this release.
In the past you’ve been limited to one answering number per source. This will change with Analytics 1.6.3! We’ve added a feature to give you the option to configure an advanced answering number matrix. Using this matrix, you may configure different answering numbers per weekday(s) and time of day. This brilliant new feature is of course also available through the API.
This feature is not activated by default. Talk to your sales contact if you want to get started with alternative answering numbers.
Features changing names
We felt that Click-for-number and Web numbers are quite similar – they are in fact dynamic. That’s why we are now changing the names of these features as described below.
Click-for-number >> Dynamic number, server side
Web number >> Dynamic number, client side
Lead notes gets enhanced with e-mail notifications
Commenting on leads and calls is a much-appreciated feature among advertisers who have started using it. To make it even better, we’ve added e-mail notifications. This means you’ll be notified if someone adds a note on a lead or call you’ve been commenting on – to keep you in the loop!
API + Voicemail = true
Voicemail greeting recording and voicemail settings on sources are now available in the API. There is also a change in the API’s statistics resources. We added paging to help keep the result sets at reasonable size.
To find out all the details concerning these changes, please request the latest API documentation from Helpdesk by logging into your account or by contacting us.
Just less than a year ago we started to explore new opportunities for our call advertising solution outside Local Search and Classified businesses.
Today we are very happy to announce Affiliate Window (UK) and buy.at (U.S. & UK) from the Digital Window group as new Freespee partners – and at the same time our expansion to the U.S. market.
In a very early phase we learned, that many big national advertisers were also dependent on calls as advertising currency – however, in performance advertising the Affiliate Networks were reluctant to include phone numbers in campaigns and for a valid reason: Phone numbers meant revenue leakage for the ad network and its publishers. Other way around, in call-intensive verticals those merchants were not able attract the most lucrative affiliates.
The new industry sector brought us also technical challenges: How to reliably track and attribute the caller from the landing page to the right affiliate, all the way to click level? How about billing, commission payments and real-time bidding and reporting? Last but not least, how to automatically determine commission level in CPA, based on the actual value of the transaction made over the phone?
During the year we have developed a solution together with some of the largest Affiliate Networks in the Europe. They join our cause of giving consumers the freedom of choice and Making Phone Calls Count for the online advertising industry.
Please see our joint Press Release belo for further information.
Affiliate Window and buy.at Team Up with Freespee for Next Generation Global Pay-Per-Call Solution
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.
Today we mourn with our brothers and sisters in Norway.
We are extremely happy to announce the launch of our office in Berlin! You can find the press release below.
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.
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:
The new features help the advertisers with lead management, so they can be assured to quickly get back to all the potential customers who tried to reach them, and also distribute the leads effectivelty within their sales team.
Please read below more information about the updates.
Voicemail is one of the new useful features in Analytics 1.6. You or your advertiser can easily record a greeting message and activate same or different voicemail for each call source. Incoming voicemail messages will appear in the leads page along with our new interactive call log. Your advertisers can listen to the messages on the web, as well as download or share them by e-mail.
The interactive call log contains a list of calls, voicemails and notes related to each lead (combination of Freespee source and caller). All users with access to the leads page can comment on incoming leads and even individual calls. Please talk to your sales representative to activate voicemail.
Notifications on missed calls is now a per-source setting that you or your advertisers can administer in the Analytics web. If voicemail is enabled for your account, you will also be able to activate notifications when new voicemail messages arrive.
And hey, there is more, we’ve added SMS notifications! Enter your mobile phone number to get notified by text message. Please talk to your sales representative to activate SMS notifications.
All e-mails sent from Analytics to end-users are now co-branded with the partner’s logo. Furthermore, we have included support contact details in these e-mails.
We added several new reports in Analytics 1.6:
In an effort to make comparison of traffic volume easier, we’ve added a brand new dynamic pie chart on the advertiser’s start page. Choose a variable to group by in the drop down and the pie chart will display a comparison between the different values.
To make it easier to add new sources we’ve added help texts and suggestion dropdowns. Hover the mouse pointer over any of the input fields to view the help texts. Previously used values will appear as suggestions when you put focus on a textbox.
Yesterday was a big day for us and our partners. Leading Ad networks in Europe, powered by the Freespee Pay-Per-Call platform, had in co-operation with their publishers generated 2 million phone leads to their advertisers. 
In some cases the calls were generated in 100% Pay-Per-Call driven campaigns, but in most cases the Calls were a complement to an existing Online CPA/CPL model, in order to monetize 100% of the traffic and eliminate the revenue leakage. The CPL value of a call starts at 3 EUR and can go as high as 100 EUR in some businesses, as real estate, car test drives etc.
In travel, up to 80% of the consumers prefer to close the deal by phone. If an Online Ad network does not add Pay-Per-Call to their CPA/CPL business model, they leak 80% of their revenue in worst case.