Everybody working in mobile advertising and media knows this all too well: Consumers have gone mobile, but advertising spending is lagging behind. This disproportional gap can be clearly seen in the statistics published by the mobile app analytics company Flurry:

Why is this and what’s the opportunity?

Today, it’s fairly easy to sell products and services to consumers online – but mobile is more challenging environment for commerce. Have you even once entered your credit card information on your phone for example?

Mobile has been an ad channel for content and entertainment, as well as on some degree branding, but only a handful of companies have so far been able to move any significant amount of actual business to mobile. Naturally this has kept mobile ad spending comparably low, but on the other hand also the cost of the media reasonable.

In short, adding Click-to-Call to mobile campaigns is the easiest and the most powerful way for any service brand to convert mobile advertising into commerce today.

Instead of buying impressions – or clicks to sites that do not convert well on mobile – why not buy qualified calls that drive new business instantly?

Google has just published a case study with Razorfish and Starwood Hotels & Resorts about the international hotel chain’s success on mobile Click-to-Call advertising, and the results are phenomenal:

• 20x increase in mobile paid search ROI
• Mobile booking growth of 20% month on month
• 200% increase in mobile traffic

In order to start testing and buying calls, contact us to get in touch with Freespee’s network and agency partners!

Sources:

Flurry blog

Google Mobile Ads Blog (full Starwood case study in PDF)

The week starts with good news for Dutch affiliate marketers – One of Freespee’s largest affiliate network partners, Zanox, has launched the first Pay-Per-Call program in Netherlands.

Publishers, who previously had to decline programs with phone numbers because of  revenue leakage, can now accept call-based programs which conversions can be reliably attributed back to the publishers.

For each call, affiliate publishers will earn a nice commission of €11.15. [Program description in Dutch]

The advertiser, Centraal Beheer (part of the large insurance group Achmea) is a prime example of a company that instantly gets call advertising: They already have a strong call center operation in place, so why not utilize it fully and drive new customers through affiliate marketing?

Whether you are an ad network, advertiser or publisher, don’t hesitate to contact us to learn how Freespee can help you to get started with call advertising, Pay-Per-Call and CPA Phone Calls.

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

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?