FINDWHAT.COM today announced the United States launch of its pioneering advertising service–FindWhat.com pay-per-call.
Pay-per-call is offered through FindWhat.com PPC2, a unique service which allows FindWhat.com advertisers and private label partners to choose pay-per-click and/or pay-per-call advertising, according to their needs.
FindWhat.com is the only performance-based marketing company that is offering pay-per-call as a new advertising service. This service is offered through FindWhat.com’s partnership with Ingenio, Inc. who developed and powers the technology behind the application. Similar to FindWhat.com’s pay-per-click service, advertisers create ads relevant to their businesses that are shown to prospective customers searching for products and services on the FindWhat.com Network. The pricing models are similar, with ads listed in descending order of bid price and delivered to the prospective customer typically as a result of a query. A key difference is that advertisers bid on relevant categories, not keywords, and also choose the geography in which they wish their ads to show: city, region, state and/or national. With the pay-per-call service, advertisers only pay when someone calls them after seeing their ad, as opposed to the pay-per-click service where advertisers only pay when someone clicks on their ad and is transferred to their website.
“FindWhat.com’s foundation was built upon an innovative, efficient business model–an online performance-based marketplace that introduces buyers to sellers at exactly the right moment, when buyers are looking for specific products and services,” stated Craig Pisaris-Henderson, chairman and chief executive officer at FindWhat.com, Inc. “While we have grown considerably in the last six years, to that of a leading international performance-based marketing and commerce enabling company, the pay-per-call service brings our online marketplace to a larger audience–offering access to offline advertisers and, as we intend in the future, to offline publishers. We believe pay-per-call is truly a ground-breaking advertising service.”
Within the pay-per-call ad, a special toll free number is inserted. When a prospective customer sees the ad and dials the toll free number, the customer is immediately forwarded to the advertiser’s business telephone. So, although the ads are shown to people searching on the Internet within the FindWhat.com Network, businesses that don’t have websites can still participate and take advantage of this growing pool of buyers. According to Statistical Research, Inc. every single day, 57% of web users search on the Internet and, according to Jupiter Research, 30% of online users bought online in 2004, with 50% expected to buy online in 2008. With 186 million Internet users in the U.S. (source: Computer Industry Almanac), there is already a large segment of consumers reachable online. To accommodate offline advertisers, FindWhat.com offers a full service account. Once set up, offline advertisers can manage their account through a telephone-based account management system.
“The market potential for attracting offline advertisers to pay-per-call is enticing, especially since there is no need on their part to develop a website,” said Rick Szatkowski, SVP/GM FindWhat.com Network/Private Label. “Consider in the U.S. alone that there are approximately 14 million small-to-mid sized businesses, 98% of which we believe are not currently able to take advantage of pay-per-click advertising, either because they don’t have a website that allows e-commerce transactions, or they don’t have a website at all. We believe many of these businesses will see pay-per-call as a logical extension of their current advertising initiatives, especially because pay-per-call provides a geographic component that allows advertisers to match the geography in which their ads will appear to the area they specifically service. Local service providers and merchants that are not Internet savvy know how to convert a call into a sale. By only paying for the actual call or lead, this large group of businesses now has the opportunity to cost-effectively expand their advertising to the online world.”
Murdok | Breaking eBusiness News
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