What is Google’s Mopocalypse really all about? Is scheduling the new centerpiece of SMB platform players? And what are the biggest drivers of the local on-demand economy? These are a few topics we tackled over the last week, curated and aggregated into the Local Media Watch newsletter.

LMW has recently doubled its frequency to weekly, so we’ll also be posting it here. Entire issues are available on the web in addition to email. So you can get it here every Friday or subscribe (free) to get it in your inbox during its regular Thursday circulation. Click below for the latest issue.

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What are the latest trends driving call monetization? Call volume from mobile search continues to ratchet up, and marketers continue to develop sophistication in driving and analyzing those calls. We unpacked this topic earlier today on a webinar hosted by the Direct Marketing Association ( video below).

Marchex also spoke on the webcast to detail its findings from a recent study on call monetization in the financial services vertical (see our writeup). This joins our ongoing coverage of the call monetization opportunity. The video chapter links are below for easy navigation, followed by the full video.

Webcast chapter links

BIA/Kelsey Opening Data & Insights
Marchex: Drilling Down on Phone Leads for Financial Services
Panelist Discussion & Audience Q&A

The post Webcast Replay: Crash Course in Call Monetization appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Marking an end of an era, CallSource has sold its media and publishing division to LogMyCalls (formerly ContactPoint.) The sale reflects several things about the evolution of the call management space — which remains absolutely vital to the local and SMB business communities.

First, it suggests that CallSource’s customer list, which includes many key Yellow Pages and vertical companies, remains deeply engaged in call tracking and is highly valued. It also suggests that CallSource’s principal business of tracking calls has begun to shift to conversation analytics and targeted leads.

This is where LogMy Calls comes in. The combination of the two companies is expected to reach new customers for LogMyCalls, and provide a lot of additional value for customers of both.

CallSource VP Geoffry Infeld, in a call with BIA/Kelsey, discussed the changing dynamics of the industry. “CallSource is all people power and crowd sourcing,” noted Infeld. The company, in its 25 year history, has come a long way from its roots as a performance training company which then focused on call tracking and finally all the things provided by a modern call center.

The key to the industry’s future success, however, is tied around being a solution provider to enterprise companies, said Infeld. “The data from voice calls must run parallel to the data that Google can capture and analyze on the Web.”

LogMyCalls President and Founder Jeremiah Wilson elaborated further. “This space needs to get as much information from phone calls as it gets from emails and websites,” Wilson told us. “The industry needs to focus on data, not call tracking.”

Wilson noted that the data around phone calls “keeps getting bigger.” And it is about much more than pay per call — although PPC does illustrate that phone calls drive a lot of value. “It is really about big data,” said Wilson. With advanced calling analytics, companies can invest in call quality and strategy, rather than just calls” he said.

The post LogMyCalls Acquires CallSource's Media and Publishing Division appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Marking an end of an era, CallSource has sold its media and publishing division to LogMyCalls (formerly ContactPoint.) The sale reflects several things about the evolution of the call management space — which remains absolutely vital to the local and SMB business communities.

First, it suggests that CallSource’s customer list, which includes many key Yellow Pages and vertical companies, remains deeply engaged in call tracking and is highly valued. It also suggests that CallSource’s principal business of tracking calls has begun to shift to conversation analytics and targeted leads.

This is where LogMy Calls comes in. The combination of the two companies is expected to reach new customers for LogMyCalls, and provide a lot of additional value for customers of both.

CallSource VP Geoffry Infeld, in a call with BIA/Kelsey, discussed the changing dynamics of the industry. “CallSource is all people power and crowd sourcing,” noted Infeld. The company, in its 25 year history, has come a long way from its roots as a performance training company which then focused on call tracking and finally all the things provided by a modern call center.

The key to the industry’s future success, however, is tied around being a solution provider to enterprise companies, said Infeld. “The data from voice calls must run parallel to the data that Google can capture and analyze on the Web.”

LogMyCalls President and Founder Jeremiah Wilson elaborated further. “This space needs to get as much information from phone calls as it gets from emails and websites,” Wilson told us. “The industry needs to focus on data, not call tracking.”

Wilson noted that the data around phone calls “keeps getting bigger.” And it is about much more than pay per call — although PPC does illustrate that phone calls drive a lot of value. “It is really about big data,” said Wilson. With advanced calling analytics, companies can invest in call quality and strategy, rather than just calls” he said.

The post LogMyCalls Acquires CallSource’s Media and Publishing Division appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

The call monetization opportunity we’ve chronicled for the past few years varies across different audience segments. The Marchex Institute — a research lab within Marchex — has brought some of these variances to light in a new report.

Specifically it looked at financial services and insurance — both high value verticals that rely heavily on inbound phone leads to close large accounts. It examined more than one million calls launched from mobile search or display ads.

The top findings (verbatim):

— Mobile advertising can be an especially effective way for both financial services and insurance companies to connect with Millennials. Calls initiated from a mobile search for both categories index very highly toward Millennials, and also index highly for Generation X, indicating that both young groups are searching for insurance and financial services companies from their mobile devices, then calling them based on those search results.

–Spanish-speaking consumers have longer and more detailed average sales conversations with financial services companies than English speaking consumers, indicating very strong purchase intent. Marchex Call DNA, technology that analyzes phone calls programmatically, found that Spanish-speakers had more detailed, richer conversations with agents through a proprietary metric, “conversation switch count,” that signals in-depth phone calls. In addition, the median phone call was two minutes longer than calls by their English-speaking counterparts.

–Hang-ups are a significant issue for both local agents and national call centers, with hold-times being a culprit. 25% of calls to national call centers for financial services and insurance companies end in a hang-up (with an average hold time of 2 minutes) while 20% of calls to local agents or branches end in a hang-up (with an average hold-time of 1:39).

These are telling results, particularly in light of the trend towards mobile searches that lead phone calls (72 billion annually according to our data). That trend is pronounced within these demographic segments that are mobile-heavy.

So what does that mean for these and other high-value verticals that close large accounts from search oriented phone leads? Marchex suggests they consider basic changes to lessen those hold times that lead to a 25 percent hang up rate.

These are solid takeaways on the surface and there is still more to unpack. We’ll be doing that in the coming weeks as part of our ongoing call monetization coverage. Meanwhile, read the rest of the Marchex Institute report here.

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Our past aggregated posts on call monetization can be found here and our white paper on the topic is here.

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The age of big data is playing out in lots of ways. One of the opportune areas it’s colliding with is call monetization. Call analytics providers like Marchex are planting this flag with analytics to derive meaning — and thus ROI — from inbound phone leads.

Following a recent video post from our call analytics session at the Interactive Local Media Conference in San Francisco, below is part two. It drills down into best practices in call analytics — told by Marchex, with examples from its product set.

We’ll follow up soon with video clips from the rest of the session. Meanwhile, we’re gearing up for BIA/Kelsey NATIONAL, where we’ll cover this topic as well. The conference takes place two weeks in Dallas. Hope to see you there.*

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*email me for discount code to attend: mbolandATbiakelsey.com

The post Conference Video: Call Monetization is All About Analytics appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Starting today, Ifbyphone is DialogTech. In conversations with the company last week, it characterized this as a move to more adequately represent the market its pursuing. In the evolutions of mobile devices and overall telephony, voice-based leads aren’t just coming in by “phone.”

Beyond semantics, there are deeper connotations that the company will reveal in the coming weeks. It’s kicking that off today with a new product launch that couples with the brand unveiling. Known as LeadFlow, it’s a toolset for third parties to build call-based leads marketplaces.

In other words it lets anyone create their own pay-per-call market. The idea is that lead brokers can arbitrage calls between incoming sources — such as generic but vertical-specific ads — and advertisers that bid on those leads. Think of it like an ad network in a box, but for voice.

“In the advertising world, affiliates solicit ad networks to run ads on their behalf, then distribute them to businesses bidding on that lead flow,” DialogTech CEO Irv Shapiro told me. “But if you want to do that with voice, you need quite a bit of phone infrastructure. That’s what LeadFlow is.”

In that way, the concept of brokering leads is nothing new. Nor is the overall call monetization opportunity. But bringing the two together is new — at least in this form. The tools to basically build your own call-based leads marketplace is meant to lower barriers to get in the call monetization game.

“This has been done with voice, but only on a proprietary basis by people who build it for themselves,” said Shapiro when I asked what makes this different. “So we’re creating a platform to democratize that make it available to any entrepreneur that believes they can put together a market.”

Meanwhile, the volume of phone calls continues to grow in the smartphone age. And the market value of call leads is growing as well, especially in high-value verticals with high-consideration purchases and complexity. That need for that human interaction isn’t going away, even in a digital age.

“Because something like life insurance is a complex purchase, [consumers] don’t want to fill out a form, they want to call a number,” said Shapiro, “An even better example is home health care. If you are going to find somebody to help watch Mom, you’re talking to them; you’re not doing that over the web.”

And that gets back to the new branding and its double entendre. While call analytics accomplish a log of dialing activity (among other things) the root word is meant to invoke dialogue — the basis of human communication that underlies the call monetization opportunity.

The post Phone Leads Marketplace and a Fresh Coat of Paint: A Briefing with DialogTech appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

The call is the new click, as we keep saying. Phone calls to businesses have ratcheted up in the age of the smartphone — a device that bolts a search engine to a phone. We project this to grow to 72 billion calls by 2018. And it’s not just quantity but quality… these are high-intent consumer calls that convert well.

We examined these concepts and supporting data in a mega-session at our December ILM conference. The first of several videos is embedded below: the session’s introductory segment in which Abid Chaudhry and I set the stage for all of the speakers with a BIA/Kelsey data presentation.

This continues our call monetization coverage including white papers, blog posts and more conference sessions at future shows. It will be a quickly moving and opportune space to watch.

The post Conference Video: Call Monetization in the Smartphone Age appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Today Marchex launched an analytics tool to better capture what it quantifies as a $4 billion opportunity for call-based mobile advertising. Call Analytics for Search is the newest addition to its mobile ad measurement product suite, and it targets enterprise-level advertisers.

The feature set (from today’s press release) includes:

— 100% keyword attribution from all phone calls driven from mobile search.
— Real-time conversion data using Marchex Call DNA technology to identify those calls that are most likely to convert into sales.
— Automated setup and synchronization with leading bid-management platforms, such as DoubleClick, Kenshoo and Marin, which allows search marketers to measure and improve campaigns accurately in real time.

This all comes back to the growth in consumer-initiated phone calls from mobile search.  BIA/Kelsey’s forecasts phone calls  from mobile search to reach 72 billion annually by 2018 — largely driven by smartphone penetration and evolving mobile user behavior.

“Click-to-call ads from search results has become a massive driver of incoming phone calls from mobile consumers to local and national businesses,” John Busby, Marchex SVP of Consumer Insights told us.

But there’s still a gap for tracking the source and quality of most of these calls. By applying technology to fix that blind spot, the idea is to give phone leads better attribution metrics.  And as call volume continues to increase, marketers will be more compelled to rely analytics to make sense of it all.

“In conservatively looking at our own data and the broader industry, we came to the surprising realization that while there’s now $4 billion being spent by marketers on click-to-call, there was not a solution for full measurement and attribution,” said Busby.

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BIA/Kelsey analyst Mike Boland, who co-wrote this post, will be a guest speaker on a webinar with Marchex at 1PM EST today.

The post Marchex Brings More Clarity to a $4 Billion Click-to-Call Market appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Mobile usage growth correlates to call volume to local businesses, which underpins the call growing call monetization opportunity. Several companies are working with this opportunity by building call analytics platforms, a key piece of the puzzle.

Invoca is one of those companies. The company, which says it has grown its revenue 12X since 2012, has pushed the ball forward with a new application, Invoca for Salesforce. The app allows marketers to manage inbound calls via their mobile devices.

“While technology like marketing automation, bid management and web analytics allow marketers to track the online customer path to purchase, as soon as someone picks up the phone, the chain is broken,” Invoca President Eric Holmen told us. “Marketers are left flat-footed when it comes to driving their highest converting leads.” The new application “works towards fixing this blind spot.”

The opportunity is underscored by BIA/Kelsey data, which projects phone leads driven by mobile search to reach 72 billion annually by 2018. Our Local Commerce Monitor (LCM) survey of SMBs meanwhile pegs phone calls as the most valuable form of customer lead.

As the volume of call-based leads to businesses continue to grow and be highly valued by local businesses, we expect that players in the space will continue to refine products to meet the demand. This growth and competition will be a driving force of the call monetization opportunity we’re covering closely.

The post Invoca: Call Analytics Fix the 'Blind Spot' in Digital Marketing appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.