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 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.*

____________

*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.

As part of our ongoing coverage of call monetization, we held webcast to further unpack our analysis and findings. You can watch the free on-demand replay (streaming slides and voiceover) here.

This comes at an opportune time, when call monetization is gaining mainstream awareness in the smartphone age. High intent calls to businesses are conducive to mobile search, and businesses want phone leads. Google’s recent Website Call Conversions push this forward, as we discuss in the webcast.

The discussion was co-hosted by bandwidth, a company positioned at the center of the call tracking and analytics opportunity.  Bandwidth’s longstanding position for powering phone calls now enables it to provide call tracking and analytics that are at the heart of the call monetization opportunity.

We discuss the ins and outs on the webcast, which follows a white paper we did with bandwidth. Both pieces of content drill down on best practices of driving phone leads to local businesses. The webinar topics, themes and takeaways are all outlined below. Click the image for the streaming replay.

The post Webcast Replay: Phone Calls, The True Business Marketing Lead appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

For the last few months, you may have noticed an increase in the conversation on this blog and elsewhere about call monetizaton. Sometimes referred to as Pay-per-call (a branch of call monetization), this includes charging businesses for inbound phone leads. It’s the topic of our latest report.

Like search marketing in its early days, call monetization is picking up fast. And in a lots of ways, it’s branching out from search. In fact, Google’s efforts with call monetization are characterizing and validating the opportunity to the broader market.

The reason this is culminating now is the growth in smartphone and resulting growth in mobile search. As we keep saying, mobile search carries a great deal of commercial intent from users. And don’t forget the mobile device is also a phone.

So the result is a flood of calls being driven to small businesses, and a greater appreciation for the value of these calls. Our SMB survey data shows that businesses very much want the phone to ring. So roll it all together and this is a huge opportunity.

We’ve tackled it with lots of webinars, analyst roundtables and blog posts. This comes together in a big white paper I’ve been working on for the last couple months. There’s lots of research, data, case studies and insights from the top players in the space.

Aside from “Pay-per-call” — the aspect that most people know call monetization for — there is are growing sub sectors supporting the field. This includes all kinds of things like call tracking, analytics, routing and even fighting nefarious areas like “call fraud.”

The exec summary for the report is below along with an analyst roundtable we did around the topic. The report is available to BIA/Kelsey clients or individual purchase. Email me (mbolandATbiakelsey.com) if you’d like to know more or talk about other ways to be involved.

Executive Summary

We’re seeing a shift underway in tech and media worlds: the tighter embrace of phone calls as a lead form for paying advertisers. Clicks and impressions, despite a sexier image and a decade of media adoration, aren’t as highly valued by many businesses as a ringing phone.

These are key reasons behind BIA/Kelsey’s estimate that $64.6 billion is spent annually across media on localized ads to generate calls to businesses. BIA/Kelsey data also indicate that 66 percent of small businesses consider phone calls the most valuable form of incoming leads.

As a result, we’ve seen a movement towards more tangible lead forms such as foot traffic and phone calls. BIA/Kelsey data indicate this is especially true in high-value verticals such as professional services, home services, and any business that typically closes sales over the phone.

This notion of calls as currency has also accelerated in the smartphone era, which has fused search with a phone. Calling a business post-engagement is intuitive for mobile users, who possess greater levels of immediacy and commercial intent than desktop counterparts.

For these reasons and more, BIA/Kelsey predicts an explosion in commercially-oriented call volume to businesses. Mobile search alone will drive 73 billion calls per year by 2018. This blessing and curse means a flood of inbound leads, but also dire need to manage them.

Therefore, businesses that get in front of consumers with the right messaging and calls to action (e.g., mobile click-to-call) can drive high quality leads and achieve high return on ad spend. Tech and media companies that can help them get there are likewise well positioned.

That translates to an opportunity for any ad tech or local media companies that already sell marketing services. Positioning advertisers to more effectively capture high value phone leads, and see clear ROI from them, will be a hugely opportune area in the coming years.

Beyond marketing, managing exploding call volumes will be vital for operational efficiencies. Given that 19 percent of inbound calls are quality leads according to BIA/Kelsey, optimizing those calls (e.g., sending to the best reps) and re-routing the rest will be critical.

This all relates to a renaissance in mobile advertising underway: The art of attribution[1]. Calls will be a vital part of all of this; to measure ad effectiveness and optimize campaigns accordingly. The suite will include call tracking and analytics to granularly determine ROI.

These call monetization components continue to develop in many ways, including location targeted ad placements, call recording, keyword tracking, sentiment analysis and identifying “call fraud.” These will be ripe areas for development in the near term.

This report examines the gravity of the call monetization opportunity, and what is being done today to capture it. What are best practices? What’s still missing? And where will value be unlocked in the coming months? The phone call is the new click.

The post Phone Calls: The Ad Currency of the Smartphone Era: A New BIA/Kelsey White Paper appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

For the last few months, you may have noticed an increase in the conversation on this blog and elsewhere about call monetizaton. Sometimes referred to as Pay-per-call (a branch of call monetization), this includes charging businesses for inbound phone leads.

Like search marketing in its early days, call monetization is picking up fast. And in a lots of ways, it’s branching out from search. In fact, Google’s efforts with call monetization are characterizing and validating the opportunity to the broader market.

The reason this is culminating now is the growth in smartphone and resulting growth in mobile search. As we keep saying, mobile search carries a great deal of commercial intent from users. And don’t forget the mobile device is also a phone.

So the result is a flood of calls being driven to small businesses, and a greater appreciation for the value of these calls. Our SMB survey data shows that businesses very much want the phone to ring. So roll it all together and this is a huge opportunity.

We’ve tackled it with lots of webinars, analyst roundtables and blog posts. This comes together in a big white paper I’ve been working on for the last couple months. There’s lots of research, data, case studies and insights from the top players in the space.

Aside from “Pay-per-call” — the aspect that most people know call monetization for — there is are growing sub sectors supporting the field. This includes all kinds of things like call tracking, analytics, routing and even fighting nefarious areas like “call fraud.”

The exec summary for the paper is below and the full version will publish next week. It will be available for BIA/Kelsey clients and for purchase. Email me (mbolandATbiakelsey.com) if you’d like to talk about other ways to be involved, especially if you’re a startup in the space. Stay tuned.

Executive Summary

We’re seeing a shift underway in tech and media worlds: the tighter embrace of phone calls as a lead form for paying advertisers. Clicks and impressions, despite a sexier image and a decade of media adoration, aren’t as highly valued by many businesses as a ringing phone.

These are key reasons behind BIA/Kelsey’s estimate that $64.6 billion is spent annually across media on localized ads to generate calls to businesses. BIA/Kelsey data also indicate that 66 percent of small businesses consider phone calls the most valuable form of incoming leads.

As a result, we’ve seen a movement towards more tangible lead forms such as foot traffic and phone calls. BIA/Kelsey data indicate this is especially true in high-value verticals such as professional services, home services, and any business that typically closes sales over the phone.

This notion of calls as currency has also accelerated in the smartphone era, which has fused search with a phone. Calling a business post-engagement is intuitive for mobile users, who possess greater levels of immediacy and commercial intent than desktop counterparts.

For these reasons and more, BIA/Kelsey predicts an explosion in commercially-oriented call volume to businesses. Mobile search alone will drive 73 billion calls per year by 2018. This blessing and curse means a flood of inbound leads, but also dire need to manage them.

Therefore, businesses that get in front of consumers with the right messaging and calls to action (e.g., mobile click-to-call) can drive high quality leads and achieve high return on ad spend. Tech and media companies that can help them get there are likewise well positioned.

That translates to an opportunity for any ad tech or local media companies that already sell marketing services. Positioning advertisers to more effectively capture high value phone leads, and see clear ROI from them, will be a hugely opportune area in the coming years.

Beyond marketing, managing exploding call volumes will be vital for operational efficiencies. Given that 19 percent of inbound calls are quality leads according to BIA/Kelsey, optimizing those calls (e.g., sending to the best reps) and re-routing the rest will be critical.

This all relates to a renaissance in mobile advertising underway: The art of attribution[1]. Calls will be a vital part of all of this; to measure ad effectiveness and optimize campaigns accordingly. The suite will include call tracking and analytics to granularly determine ROI.

These call monetization components continue to develop in many ways, including location targeted ad placements, call recording, keyword tracking, sentiment analysis and identifying “call fraud.” These will be ripe areas for development in the near term.

This report examines the gravity of the call monetization opportunity, and what is being done today to capture it. What are best practices? What’s still missing? And where will value be unlocked in the coming months? The phone call is the new click.

The post White Paper Preview: Phone Calls: The New Ad Currency of the Smartphone Era appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Not a week has passed recently without news or data releases in the emerging area of call monetization. That includes yesterday’s Invoca announcement. Mobile search-driven call volume is exploding. And that works out because Local Commerce Monitor™ data indicate that businesses want the phone to ring.

Yesterday we released a new white paper on the topic. Sponsored by Bandwidth.com, this free paper takes a look at the call monetization opportunity specifically with SMBs. Much of the activity and adoption so far has been large brands but the opportunity is being brought down-market to SMBs.

The executive summary is below and you can download the full paper for free here. We won’t be slowing down on this topic any time soon, including our conference next month in Atlanta, and a larger BIA/Kelsey research report on call monetization that will publish in a few weeks. Stay tuned.

Executive Summary

The U.S. small business (SMB) advertising opportunity is huge. According to BIA/Kelsey, $89 billion is spent annually on advertising by SMBs. This is evolving quickly with location-aware media such as mobile, and the commercially-geared user intent that comes with it.

This opportunity is counterbalanced by significant challenges however. Though large, the SMB segment is characterized by a fragmented customer base that has low technical sophistication. Simplicity and clear ROI are vital to sell to and retain their business.

In addition, SMBs generally have small budgets and little time to manage or monitor marketing campaigns. For all of these reasons, the sophisticated and more complex digital marketing products sold to larger enterprise and national brands don’t often work for SMBs.

This has led to difficult advertiser acquisition and high churn for SMB-focused digital marketing products. For example, search — once positioned as the “performance-based” Holy Grail for SMBs — has proven to be too complex for most SMBs to handle on their own.

That’s compounded by the fact that most local commerce takes place offline, but is increasingly influenced online. The gap between online and offline however causes a lack of clear causality between clicks/impressions and conversions, thus lowering perceived ROI.

As a result, we’ve seen a movement towards more tangible and simple lead sources such as foot traffic and phone calls. BIA Kelsey data indicate this is especially true in high-value local verticals such as auto and home services, which close most business by phone.

The smartphone revolution has further boosted the trend towards calls as a lead source. The device’s inherent capabilities (native dialer) and common use case for high-immediacy local search make it seamless for ready-to-buy consumers to call local merchants.

Therefore, SMBs that can effectively get in front of consumers with the right messaging and calls to action (e.g., call a business) can achieve high ROI on ad spend and drive high quality leads. Companies that can help them get there are likewise well positioned.

This is only half the battle though. Also needed are effective tracking and analytics to empirically communicate ROI. Developers are building tools to help advertisers attribute campaign effectiveness and optimize and iterate campaigns and operations accordingly.
Phone Calls Are the New Click: The True SMB Marketing Opportunity

The state of call tracking and analytics continues to develop in lots of ways including location targeted ad placements, call recording, keyword tracking and sentiment analysis. These will be ripe areas for development as call monetization continues to evolve.

This report examines opportunities in call monetization for SMBs, and agents operating on their behalf. What’s being done today? What are best practices? What’s still missing? And where will value be unlocked in the coming months? The phone call is the new click.

The post Phone Calls are the New Click: A Free BIA/Kelsey White Paper appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Call Monetization and marketing company Invoca today announced its new voice and call analytics platform, Signal. It took the opportunity to also announce it has added Salesforce.com as an investor in its Series C round, which we initially covered back in January.

From today’s press release:

While platforms like Google Analytics have given marketers valuable insight into website interactions, with Invoca Signal, marketers gain valuable insights discovered through voice interactions. Invoca Signal helps companies analyze and act on every inbound sales conversation. The technology listens to what happens on an inbound call and automates the next action by applying scoring techniques with valuable metrics and conversion data relevant to the marketer’s unique sales and marketing processes.

This builds from a topic we’ve been covering here, in written reports and webinars a great deal lately. Smartphone penetration and resulting search volume is driving lots of commercially-oriented phone calls to business. We estimate 65 billion calls from mobile search by 2016.

That compels technologies to drive, track, analyze and manage all these calls for businesses of all sizes. It’s particularly a good opportunity for local media companies which already have advertiser relationships and location targeted advertising bundles that continue to evolve.

Beyond local, the opportunity is also growing in the enterprise space and at the large brand level. That’s especially true within high-value verticals that close business via inbound calls (think call centers). That includes lots of insurance, auto, financial, and professional services to name a few.

Invoca specifically zeros in on a lot of these enterprise opportunities and has done a lot to plug into Salesforce, leading up to the enterprise giant’s investment today. If you think about it, customer relationship management and inbound lead optimization tie right in with call tracking.

We’ll continue to see all of this advance with Invoca and other leaders in the call monetization space. These players are innovating around different flavors of call tracking, analysis and monetization, and we’re seeing quite an ecosystem develop. See our recent webcasts on the topic.

Lastly, we’ll be publishing a white paper next week that unpacks all of this, including supporting data, case studies, and our signature analysis of the opportunity at hand. Tomorrow we’ll provide a deeper preview of that paper and below is a recent analyst round table discussion. Stay tuned.

The post Invoca Signals a New Direction in Call Monetization appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Content marketing is fast becoming core to many SMB marketing strategies, to the point that it threatens to crowd out more traditional media spending. And call monetization is getting more attention as growing smartphone use spurs a rapid rise in low funnel (high purchase intent) mobile generated calls to SMBs.

These two hot topics in local digital media just happen to be on deck as the next two BIA/Kelsey Insight Papers. Last week we launched a Google Hangout with the authors of these two upcoming reports to get a preview of what they are all about.

First we asked Abid Chaudhry to tell us about his upcoming piece on content marketing. His central contention is that “Content marketing is beginning to take over as the primary advertising budget spend of most SMBs.” His view is the growth of mobile and social as marketing channels for SMBs means that content marketing, broadly defined, is threatening to crowd out more traditional forms of digital advertising, such as pay per click.

“The name of the game now is consolidation,” Chaudhry said. “Folks that used to do direct marketing only vs. social vs. reputation management are all coming together to offer integrated solutions. That is the future of content marketing.”

Mike Boland also joined the hangout to preview his report on call monetization, which in many ways will be a follow up to the 2012 report “Call-Based Ads: Eliminating the Unknown from Advertising.”

Boland contends the big change since the 2012 paper has been the even greater influence of smartphones on call monetization. Today, smartphones are in the hands of about 63% of mobile users.

“If you pan back, pay per call has been around a while…but it was physically separated from the phone,” Boland said. “Now, with the search device literally bolted to the phone, we see an explosion of call volume.”

BIA/Kelsey estimates mobile call volume will reach 65 billion by 2016. And mobile calls by their nature tend to have a higher purchase intent, and thus higher conversion rate, than calls generated from desktop search.

“Businesses want calls,” Boland said. “Our data shows that calls are the most valued form of lead for small businesses.”

Check out this video to hear both analysts discuss the key themes in their upcoming reports, Chaudhry goes first, with Boland’s discussion of call monetization beginning at the 5:20 mark:

The post Analyst Roundtable: Content Marketing Meets Call Monetization appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

More evidence emerged today that calls are the preferred local performance measurement currency. The call analytics firm Telmetrics released data showing a 160% increase in the number of online local search call programs it monitored in 2013.

So what does this mean?

“The number of marketers adopting calls as a cross-media ad performance metric is growing significantly because digital marketers recognize the value of using call analytics as key engagement and conversion indicators,” said Bill Dinan, president of Telmetrics. “While mobile growth is helping fuel the increased interest in calls, marketers and local search advertising providers can do more to harness the full value that call measurement technology can deliver.”

This is consistent with BIA/Kelsey data that has consistently shown SMBs value calls over and above other lead forms (e.g., clicks, emails, etc.), primarily because calls tend to be low purchase funnel, high conversion leads. The chart below (click on the image to enlarge) from BIA/Kelsey’s Local Commerce Monitor™ Wave 17 shows calls edging out even in person visits as a preferred lead source.

Calls will be a key coverage area for BIA/Kelsey in 2014. Our senior analyst and mobile guru Mike Boland is currently at work on a major Insight Paper, focused on the latest developments in call monetization.

The post Telmetrics Maps Big Growth in Digital Call Measurement appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.