More Pay-Per-Call: A Conversation With RingRevenue

Prompted by my writeup of Google’s new mobile pay-per-call program, I had the chance today to speak with the executive team at RingRevenue.

The company provides a platform for partners to monetize incoming calls. It private labels the platform for publishers to integrate trackable phone numbers into their ad units. This of course is nothing new and we’ve seen other providers in the directory space and other media.

But RingRevenue differentiates itself with a simple dashboard in which advertisers answer a set of questions about their business and the types of leads they want. This includes time of day (think business hours), call duration and other attributes specific to their business.

From there, a quality processing engine weighs incoming calls based on these criteria and then charges advertisers accordingly. The company is interested in looking at other technologies such as speech processing (like Yext), but for now is driven mostly by simplicity (like Google).

For the same reason, RingRevenue has begun to apply certain proxies for call quality that may be specific to certain industries or verticals. This lets it automatically apply best practices to different advertisers that don’t want to manage their own call quality criteria.

With the full realization that many local merchants value calls over clicks, RingRevenue has its eye on the local space, and on publishers that vie for local ad dollars. It’s also looking heavily at mobile, which can be an incremental source of call volume — in both quantity and quality.