Comments on: White Paper Preview: Phone Calls: The New Ad Currency of the Smartphone Era http://staging.blog.biakelsey.com/index.php/2014/05/16/white-paper-preview-phone-calls-the-new-ad-currency-of-the-smartphone-era-2/ LOCAL MEDIA WATCH. The Nexus of All Things Local Mon, 01 Jun 2015 22:23:47 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.2.39 By: Curtis http://staging.blog.biakelsey.com/index.php/2014/05/16/white-paper-preview-phone-calls-the-new-ad-currency-of-the-smartphone-era-2/comment-page-1/#comment-2713746 Tue, 19 Aug 2014 12:55:09 +0000 http://blog.biakelsey.com/?p=30472#comment-2713746 Hmm it looks like your blog ate my first comment (it was
extremely long) so I guess I’ll just sum it up what I had written and say, I’m thoroughly enjoying your blog.

I as well am an aspiring blog writer but I’m still new to the whole thing.
Do you have any points for beginner blog writers? I’d genuinely appreciate it.

Feel free to surf to my blog post How To Get Ripped Fast (Curtis)

]]> By: Mike Boland http://staging.blog.biakelsey.com/index.php/2014/05/16/white-paper-preview-phone-calls-the-new-ad-currency-of-the-smartphone-era-2/comment-page-1/#comment-2641565 Wed, 21 May 2014 22:37:42 +0000 http://blog.biakelsey.com/?p=30472#comment-2641565 Thanks Chris. Good to hear from you and good comments. We should do a briefing on this topic to catch up.

]]> By: Chris MacDonald http://staging.blog.biakelsey.com/index.php/2014/05/16/white-paper-preview-phone-calls-the-new-ad-currency-of-the-smartphone-era-2/comment-page-1/#comment-2640631 Tue, 20 May 2014 21:58:49 +0000 http://blog.biakelsey.com/?p=30472#comment-2640631 As one of the earliest and most manic champions of call-based performance advertising for local media companies, I fully agree with your predictions regarding call volume management and the riddle of attribution, but it’s your proclamation of “calls” as the new “click” that is not quite as simple as it seems.
I know this because I’ve been shouting that mantra from the rooftops for many months. In that time, I’ve come to realize that calls are the new click in some ways: calls will replace clicks as the definitive response metric that we sell to local advertisers but, unlike clicks, the road from a call to a conversion is short driveway compared to the winding, sometimes “you can’t get there from here” road that might lead from a click to a website through to a conversion.

Local advertisers have been spending their hard earned marketing budgets (often borrowed from the Mortgage Budget”) on search campaigns for more than a decade. As an industry, we’ve conditioned local advertisers to jump for joy when their ads were blessed with a click; taught them that this was the purpose of our marketing efforts and when clicks were in abundance, it was a sign that we had succeeded in spending their marketing dollars wisely.

Unfortunately those clicks often led to scanned restaurant menus or nephew-built websites with no contact information. They might have been a step towards a conversion, but most likely the first step of a long and winding journey that consumers rarely followed to the end.

In our new mobile world, employing a call-based performance advertising model, the click IS the conversion. It’s a massive move in the right direction, a model that could actually yield positive ROI for local advertisers and start to revitalize Main Street business.

You’ve been on top of this revolution for some time, Mike. Please keep it up and thanks for all of the insight

Chris MacDonald
President / Founder
UpRing LLC

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