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?

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!

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!

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.

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.

After a 3 hours meeting with one of the most successful search engines for real estate in the UK, I realize that UK is the European answer to US in terms of performance based marketing.

The performance based business model is not just a word everyone is talking about, it is also implemented in daily business transactions. In addition, the UK market has already tried advertising setups with no phone numbers, hence 100% focus in driving traffic from the Advert to the advertiser web site or on online form for requesting a proposal. The reason behind this setup has been the inability to trace phone calls.

What happened?

Consumers didn’t appreciate it. Our statistics  show that up to 50% of the visitors of a vertical search engine service wants to contact the advertiser for a voice conversation. All efforts to make this complicated, drives down the value of the service.

Ironically, the average sales conversion rate for an inbound call is 60-70% in most industries. Average sales conversion rate for a click through is 1-2% in most industries. Hence, the value of the call is up to 30 times higher than the value of a click.

In UK, online business has understood this and are now looking for the best tech companies that can help them monetize on generated voice contact leads.

For this reason they contacted Freespee. With traditional display numbers, there is no business case in tracing traffic for an Advert with less than 5-10 calls per month. The Freespee number algorithms enable our customers to trace phone calls for all Adverts, even those with 1 call per year.

We wrote a couple of very large contracts the last 3 weeks. During this time, I had more contact with legal councils than with my family…

Both will use Freespee Apps as well as build their own Freespee API driven Voice App.

Yesterday, a genius in superfast processing large amounts of data joined our tech team. Per-Axel is a rock solid developer, that will help us bring call analytics solutions to a level we didn’t know exist.