As you probably already know, "Pay-Per-Click" is a powerful and affordable way (if done correctly) to generate instant traffic to your Website. This is a form of "performance" advertising where you only pay if someone clicks to your site from a search engine. Imagine your ability to convert if you could have your Web advertising generate phone calls instead of just visits to your site. Read on to see how this new form of pay-for-results advertising may just change the way you generate leads.

Linda Craft, principle owner of the Linda Craft Team in Raleigh, NC is one of the first Realtors® in the nation to institute pay-per-call advertising. Last month (May 2005) her buyer's agents received a total of 50 calls from this service. Each call cost an average of $4.51 and lasted an average of 7 minutes. That means these 50 call-in leads cost her $225 and change. Now ask yourself this, how much would you be willing to pay for 50 inbound inquiry calls? How much is it costing you now with your standard newspaper advertising?

What makes this so powerful is that you are able to tap the growing ranks of Internet real estate consumers, yet drive them directly to your phone and only pay for the calls that are made. This gives you enormous reach and makes your advertising dollars extremely easy to measure, unlike traditional print advertising. Also, it should be much easier to convert a phone call than an anonymous Web visitor.

How Pay-Per-Call Works

The currently major player in the pay-per-call space is a company called Ingenio. Once you open your advertising account, getting the ads up is a simple five-step process all done online:

1. Create your pay-per-call ad - through the convenient online form. You are not given much word space for your ad so make it compelling using as few words as possible.
2. Choose your service areas - you can choose to have your ad show up on a local, regional or national basis. This service has the ability to determine (most of the time) where the visitor is located. Make sure you choose only the areas that you service, otherwise you may be paying for calls that don't have a chance of converting.
3. Choose your business category - just click on the service categories that best fit what you do —there are several available for real estate services.
4. Set your phone call lead price - this is the maximum "bid" for positioning in the search results, similar to pay-per-click.
5. Choose your payment plan - you can set a monthly budget so that once your budget is used up (from lead calls being made) then your ad stops being displayed.

Currently AOL Search is the only major search engine to which Ingenio pay-per-call delivers its ads. For example, after typing in "Raleigh Real Estate" into the AOL search bar, the following was displayed under the "Sponsored Links" section near the top of the page:

The toll-free number circled in red is the number assigned by Ingenio so they can track the frequency and duration of the calls.  Keep in mind you only pay for the calls that are made. You will also note that Linda is the only advertiser in the Raleigh area that is using this advertising method. If you do a quick search for your area, chances are - no one is using it yet! This represents a huge opportunity for those that act on this quickly before it becomes too popular and thus drives up the cost-per-call pricing.

It is critical to track your conversion rate with any kind of advertising program you implement. And, at $4 or more per call it is particularly important. At this time Linda and her team are still sorting out the results of those calls. Expect a follow up from me in a future article with the results.

This Is Just The Beginning

Pay-per-call is here to stay. It is just a matter of time before Google, Yahoo and Microsoft institute similar programs. Now is the time for you to jump on this powerful bandwagon. Budget a couple hundred dollars a month to see what happens. Chances are it will be some of the most profitable advertising dollars you've ever spent!