Pay-Per-Call Frenzy
It appears the SEO industry is entering a new era of search engine marketing with Pay-Per-Call advertising. Pay Per Call is a performance-based system that charges advertisers on a per-call basis as opposed to Pay Per Click which charges advertisers a per-click fee. This new form of SEM could and most likely will be HUGE!
Several months ago, FindWhat was the first search engine to enter the Pay-Per-Call arena and since then, AOL jumped on board. Both companies currently utilize Ingenio’s ingenious pay-per-call model and it seems to be working well for both the search engines and advertisers.
Other search engines wanting to embrace Pay-Per-Call are Google and MSN. Rumor has it that Google and MSN are gearing up their technologies to add Pay-Per-Call to their arsenal for advertisers, but no beta or launch dates have been published or forecasted.
I don’t understand why one of these engines didn’t just buy Skype while they had the opportunity. By not moving quickly, they have lost acquisition potential for this top-tier Pay-Per-Call service company as eBay recently purchased Skype for $2.6 billion dollars.
I have a feeling eBay is going to take Pay-Per-Call beyond search advertising and create even more performance-based advertising potential in areas we can’t even imagine just yet. Time will tell.
There is no acronym available for this new SEM model, so I think I’ll call it PPP (pay-per-phone-call).
I will follow up on this new advertising platform as time progresses and look forward to seeing this new SEM model flourish in the months and years to come.