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.

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.

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.

Web and mobile search continue to develop as places where high-intent consumers find local businesses. This is driving a lot of call volume, especially in mobile search where the device itself is also a phone. Meanwhile, SMBs cite phone calls as their most valued lead source according to BIA/Kelsey research. Marchex’s recently launched CallDNA product represents an important area of call monetization: effectively tracking and measuring call quality. This is reaching all new levels in the age of big data. At BIA/Kelsey‘s Leading in Local: Interactive Local Media conference last week we heard from Ziad Ismail, Senior VP of Product & Engineering at Marchex about this new product.

“Currently we are seeing a new epidemic of call spammers” says Ismail, “receiving calls from various spammers can throw off analytics,” so this is where real-time call analytics comes in. Real-time call analytics is when technology is analyzing calls as they are happening. By doing this illegitimate calls are able to be cut out before they go onto the books. CallDNA also enables SMBs to know there is value in what they are doing. “SMBs need to know what actually worked in the system. Click targets are not very good but when you dig deeper it becomes obvious which calls are good and which are not and that is what is important” says Ismail.

Call monetization is a huge opportunity for companies in the call tracking world. In addition to Ismail’s discussion about this opportunity, a panel was also held at last week’s Leading in Local: Interactive Media conference to discuss best practices in the industry. Among this panel it was a universal feeling that the term “call tracking” was no longer an accurate description of what companies in the industry do. “Call tracking is a reactive technology” says Irv Shapiro, CEO, CTO and Founder of Ifbyphone, “it allows you to measure tech and re-optimize in the future. Our customers want more hits today so we need a proactive technology, not one for the future”. Dinesh Ravishanker, CEO and Cofounder of CallFire says “it is all about making sure when the call is actually delivered value is added at that time. We need to deliver when it is needed. Call intelligence, bringing intelligence to that phone call is where we are headed”.

On the other hand, the term call tracking is not completely irrelevant. J.Scott Hamilton, GM, North America at Response Tap says “we are all doing an element of call tracking, there is an association. The question is what type of an association is it. What we are focused on is what you want to track in your phone calls and then we will use that data to make or save you money”. Often the information that is tracks will help to improve the consumer experience. “When a consumer engages in a phone conversation, we need to enhance the customer experience. We need to make sure the caller’s digital experience is taken into account so that both parties are on the same page and are able to get their desired outcomes.” says Drew Thorne-Thomsen, VP of Business Development at Invoca.

The post At Leading in Local: ILM 2013: Focus on Calls: The Real Local Currency appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

If getting customers to pick up the phone is the first priority for SMBs, the second is vetting caller traffic to distill quality leads from noise … and to understand the drivers behind each activity. “Bridging the online-offline gap” is emerging as a critical component of SMB reputation management. VendAsta is now incorporating call tracking intelligence from Telmetrics into its white-label reputation management platform that publishers can offer to their local clients.

In addition to monitoring customer reviews across social networks and online review sites, VendAsta’s Step Rep will now offer a layer of speech-to-text call tracking through Telmetrics’ Voice Trends that will enable deeper understanding of  customer sentiment through keywords spoken and call duration, location, demographics and time.

VendAsta’s ultimate goal in this integration is to paint a comprehensive picture of consumer interactions with SMBs. This connects online presence to offline lead generation in a more holistic reputation management solution. It also allows businesses to build off of phone conversations to push into social media and deal-a-day offers through a deeper understanding of met and unmet customer demands.

BIA/Kelsey forecasts that local advertising spend on ERPM will reach $3.5 billion in revenues by 2014, and several major brands — Marchex, MerchantCircle, ReachLocal (through SMB Live), Yext (Yext Rep), Yellowbot and others — are lining up to compete for these SMB dollars. 

Telmetrics President Bill Dinan told BIA/Kelsey that VendAsta’s move into call tracking represents an important step in the company’s “drive to distinguish” in this crowded sector. “The wave of the future in local search is that you have to specialize in somthing.”

StepRep is one of many white-label products that VendAsta offers for publishers to rebrand for their local merchants. The Saskatchewan-based software provider offers a daily deal white label called Daily Deals 3S that has been picked up by both DirectWest in Saskatchewan (MySaskDeals) and Winnipeg publisher EX Finder (EZ Deal). Its suite also includes a social recommendation engine to validate consumer reviews through users’ personal networks.

The post Telmetrics Rings In Call Tracking for VendAsta's Rep Management appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

If getting customers to pick up the phone is the first priority for SMBs, the second is vetting caller traffic to distill quality leads from noise … and to understand the drivers behind each activity. “Bridging the online-offline gap” is emerging as a critical component of SMB reputation management. VendAsta is now incorporating call tracking intelligence from Telmetrics into its white-label reputation management platform that publishers can offer to their local clients.

In addition to monitoring customer reviews across social networks and online review sites, VendAsta’s Step Rep will now offer a layer of speech-to-text call tracking through Telmetrics’ Voice Trends that will enable deeper understanding of  customer sentiment through keywords spoken and call duration, location, demographics and time.

VendAsta’s ultimate goal in this integration is to paint a comprehensive picture of consumer interactions with SMBs. This connects online presence to offline lead generation in a more holistic reputation management solution. It also allows businesses to build off of phone conversations to push into social media and deal-a-day offers through a deeper understanding of met and unmet customer demands.

BIA/Kelsey forecasts that local advertising spend on ERPM will reach $3.5 billion in revenues by 2014, and several major brands — Marchex, MerchantCircle, ReachLocal (through SMB Live), Yext (Yext Rep), Yellowbot and others — are lining up to compete for these SMB dollars. 

Telmetrics President Bill Dinan told BIA/Kelsey that VendAsta’s move into call tracking represents an important step in the company’s “drive to distinguish” in this crowded sector. “The wave of the future in local search is that you have to specialize in somthing.”

StepRep is one of many white-label products that VendAsta offers for publishers to rebrand for their local merchants. The Saskatchewan-based software provider offers a daily deal white label called Daily Deals 3S that has been picked up by both DirectWest in Saskatchewan (MySaskDeals) and Winnipeg publisher EX Finder (EZ Deal). Its suite also includes a social recommendation engine to validate consumer reviews through users’ personal networks.

The post Telmetrics Rings In Call Tracking for VendAsta’s Rep Management appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

SMBs are looking for their phones to ring and their doors to open, pure and simple. These cash register-related activities largely sway their perceptions of online marketing campaign effectiveness. Kenshoo Local, a division of SEM provider Kenshoo, aims to specifically meet these needs via an integration with Mongoose Metrics call-tracking platform. Using the platform, agencies and IYPs will be able to connect online clicks to offline call conversions for their local clients. 

Todd Herrold, Kenshoo’s director of product marketing, told BIA/Kelsey that this partnership differs from normal call tracking mechanisms. It focuses on ID’ing the most effective keywords that convert into calls, not simply amassing a high volume of clicks in hopes that the phone will ring. Marketing campaigns can then be adjusted to pinpoint an “optimal bid” by distilling those keywords that are delivering calls from those that aren’t.

Here’s how it works: Mongoose Metrics offers a “session-based DNR,” or Dynamic Number Replacement, that assigns each Web site user a distinct call-tracking number after he or she clicks through on a search ad. They are also served a “keyword identifier” by Kenshoo Local. After the business is called by the user, keywords and search queries are matched to the number and identifier. The matching is based on an algorithm that probes call duration to determine call value, then circles back to the keywords that drove the calls. Keyword choices can be modified based on results.

An open API allows Kenshoo Local to connect directly with Mongoose Metrics to utilize the call-tracking solution. Its partners can then view their clients’ call-tracking reports within Kenshoo’s interface. 

The partnership marks Kenshoo’s latest penetration into the local advertising market. The SEM company, which launched in 2006, moved up market from smaller agencies to global firms and international brands (Wal-Mart, Sears, Travelocity). It introduced Kenshoo Local at ILM:09 last December to scale its SEM technology platform to IYPs that need efficient, cost-effective tools to manage droves of SMB campaigns.

Kenshoo Local General Manager Sivan Metzger noted that Kenshoo is a “technology-only play” that doesn’t do “fulfillment for SMBs.” The company focuses on building out its platform for partners to bring added value and accountability to their clients, not managing SEM programs for SMBs directly. 

Next steps for Kenshoo include building comprehensive quality-of-call data that identify the value of sales, as well as adding voice recognition software that mines calls for keywords that activate higher-quality calls. Metzger is speaking at DMS ’10 in Dallas next week, where Kenshoo plans to make a big announcement, he says.

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As the demand for dependable call-tracking tools intensifies in the SMB marketplace, WebVisible — the Irvine, California-based local online marketing provider — has unveiled upgrades to its portfolio of services to enable more focused ad geotargeting and greater call-tracking capabilities for businesses.

WebVisible has boosted its Geneva Platform to serve locally targeted ads for its clients across all search engines. CEO Kirsten Mangers told BIA/Kelsey that not only will SMBs be able to calculate their advertising radius across an entire city or ZIP code, but they can also “drill down to individual blocks within the radius to focus their marketing efforts on high or low penetration areas.” 

Enhanced geotargeting feeds into call-mapping features provided by the company’s Merchant Center 1.6, giving clients smarter tools to distinguish “bona fide leads” from peripheral ones. 

Mapping shows advertisers exactly where calls are originating from within their radius. The platform is interactive, so SMBs can then grade calls in order to earmark effective leads and block unwanted calls. They have the autonomy to say “what is a good call and what isn’t.” WebVisible then can apply its algorithm on the back-end to adjust marketing campaigns for more efficient bidding and targeting. And, as dictated by its SMB partners, it can also create alerts tied to their call blocks.

The entire suite is designed to, as Mangers put it, address “the elephant in the room” for call tracking and pay-per-call providers: distilling qualified leads from irrelevant ones. Easier said than done, she reminded us, because what is “bona fide” to one business may not be to another. Only when this issue is definitively resolved can SMBs, resellers and agencies all evolve to true transaction-based, performance-based models. 

Yext has already introduced voice recognition and processing technology to help merchants better understand their leads, a developing sweet spot for WebVisible, too. Mangers said it would enable the company to scan voice recordings for a deeper contextual understanding of how to handle these calls, which is pivotal in addressing online churn. 

Mangers also updated us on new partnerships that WebVisible is brokering. The firm has several deals brewing in Asia and is redoubling efforts outside the U.S. because “publishing partners are 18-24 months behind us in creating viable online products” (though many are ahead in mobile). It announced a partnership with McClatchy Co. in April in which the newspaper conglomerate plans to fully integrate WebVisible’s marketing platform across its 29 markets by the end of 2010 to bolster local sales.

As for location-based mobile services, Mangers personally is an eager early adopter but cautions against putting cart before horse until the market matures to a greater level of standardization in which reach can be gained through more aggregated, trackable distribution. “App-vertising” is an important future initiative, but in the meantime, it’s “back-to-basics” for SMBs, with some handy new tools in their kits.

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