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

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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.

Last week, we did a successful webcast with Marchex on the topic of search and pay-per-call. This week, we continue the theme of call monetization in a webcast with Five9. They will host the event on Wednesday and I will join as a guest speaker to characterize the market opportunity.

We’ll discuss how the barriers are lowering — especially for marketers who are more empowered to manage cloud software offerings without approval/management of the IT department and costly on-site servers. That same principle is causing the capability to be ‘democratized’ down-market to SMBs.

The discussion will build from lots of data and research we’ve done on this topic. The webcast is free and should have lots of valuable perspectives, including a preview of how Five9 fits into the equation. The company provides a Saas-based call center management platform. Hope to see you there.

The post Webcast: Call Monetization in the Age of the Cloud 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.

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.

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.

According to our newly released LCM wave 18 data, SMBs find that call-based leads tend to be of higher quality than email (where SMBs reported 43% to be good/excellent), Facebook (35.3% good/excellent) and even in store visits (58.8% good/excellent). Between those SMBs that found call-based leads to be of “good quality” (33.2%) or “excellent quality” (35.5%) that’s an astonishing 68.6 percent. What does this mean? Increasingly, phone calls are becoming the bread and butter lead-type for the vast majority of small businesses.

This has led to a lot of interesting and complex challenges for marketers that service SMB campaigns – with the most pressing issue being how to attribute offline calls that came from online campaigns back to the campaigns themselves. Dynamic call-tracking numbers have been able to solve this problem partially, but still don’t provide the depth of analytics that are necessary to create the highest return on investment for marketing campaigns.

This is where companies like Invoca come in. Until recently, SMBs have had a difficult time tracking the digital path a consumer took that led to them placing a phone call. Essentially, once a person calls into a business from an online campaign, they would switch from online to offline and would appear “new” to the business. Existing marketing automation, retargeting, and CRM software platforms often go blind once this transition takes place.

Invoca and other call analytics platforms have developed solutions to bridge the online-offline call intelligence gap, and have been able to equip marketers with the necessary data and insight needed to maximize marketing campaign ROI. We recently sat with the Invoca product team to learn about Signal, their new phone call analytics solution designed to assist businesses with connecting keywords and campaigns to phone calls – layered with contextual data that aids in analyzing the content of the call in real-time.

A key element of the tool is dynamic session-based tracking. In the event a number changes from one campaign to the next, the customer will still be remembered and identified from the last time they clicked through and called. Once the call occurs, the software creates or links to an existing profile, attributes information related to the call, then allows for data dips into third party solutions, then finally routes them to another sales department based on a lead scoring and routing automated metric system.

Signal takes the context of the call a step further with sentiment analysis after the call has been connected and a conversation has begun. Pairing these two types of data while connecting it with keywords from the online campaign provides SMBs with interesting call attribution capabilities.

Call-based leads will continue to be the gold-standard lead-type for SMBs as mobile devices and mobile search continue to boom. We expect the interest/demand for call intelligence and analytics solutions like Invoca’s Signal product to grow as marketers continue ride the mobile-call wave.

The post Invoca Adds Context to Calls with Launch of Signal appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.