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.

Last week, call tracking and analytics provider Ifbyphone announced not one, but two major milestones. First, the company announced that it has raised $30 million in series E funding — bringing its total funding to $60 million. It also announced the acquisition of call tracking provider Mongoose Metrics.

With the infusion and acquisition, we asked the company where it’s headed next.

“We will focus on what we have always done: developing the most innovative products, providing the best customer experience in the industry, and expanding our organization to support our growing list of clients,” said Steve Griffiths, Vice President of Marketing and Product Strategy at Ifbyphone. “With the Mongoose Metrics’ team at our side, we are well positioned to do so.”

The Ifbyphone platform is designed to help businesses drive, track, analyze and route phone calls to the most appropriate sales rep to convert them into revenue. The company has been providing call-based marketing technology solutions for SMBs and the agencies that serve them since its launch in 2005.

The post New Funding and Acquisition: A Conversation with Ifbyphone appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

In case you missed our webcast last week on call monetization, here is the link to watch the free on-demand replay. That includes streaming video, and access to the presentation slides.

The webcast itself was action packed with lots of data points, concrete examples, tactical analysis and audience questions. Ifbyphone VP Steve Griffiths and I went back and forth on lots of these issues in about 50 minutes of slides and dialogue.

The biggest data takeaways included the growth in call volume to local business that’s correlated to the smartphone era; mobile user intent for commercially oriented searches that drive phone calls; and the degree to which local businesses value phone leads (high).

Given those data as setup analysis, Griffiths gave lots of good examples of how Ifbyphone as a leader in call monetizaion is tackling the opportunity. We heard examples, best practices and things that companies in this space can start implementing.

The video is available for stream or download, and it captures all of the visuals (slides) and audio from the webcast. Pro tip: the WMV file streams natively in IE (given the Microsoft tie-in) but initiates a hefty download if you access it using Chrome or Firefox.

The post Surviving the Mobile Tsunami: Webcast Recap (and Replay Link) appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

On Thursday, we’ll host a live webcast with call monetization provider Ifbyphone. The topic: BIA/Kelsey projects mobile calls to local businesses will reach 65 billion annually by 2016. That’s going to be a lot of calls to manage, track, route, optimize and most of all monetize.

This fits nicely with other trends we’re seeing such as mobile users’ high local intent, and the fact that many local businesses highly value phone calls. It’s in fact the highest rated form of inbound marketing lead among BIA/Kelsey’s Local Commerce Monitor survey respondents.

We’ll go through all of this including BIA/Kelsey data and analysis. Then we’ll drill down to see how Ifbyphone is tackling these factors as a representative sample of the market opportunity and best practices. This will be the first in a series of webcasts over the next month on call monetization.

More to come on the rest and please sign up for Thursday’s free webcast here. We’ll have lots of data and analysis and even some freebies at the end, such as discount codes to our big May Leading in Local conference in Atlanta. Hope to see you there (the conference and the webcast).

The post Free Webcast: Surviving the Tsunami of Mobile Call Monetization appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

As briefly mentioned earlier today, voice based marketing automation provider Ifbyphone has secured a $9 million series D funding round. It was led by River Cities Capital, and it brings Ifbyphone’s total funding to date to $30 million.

This is one telling sign among many of growth in the broader call monetization space. Our data indicate that $68 billion is spent annually across media on localized ads to generate calls to businesses and 61 percent of SMBs consider phone calls the most valuable form of incoming lead.

According to Ifbyphone’s press release:

It’s why even though today’s fastest-growing new economy companies, such as SaaS (software as a service) and other high-performing businesses, may market their products online, they generate revenue over the phone using inside sales and telemarketing teams. These companies use voice-based marketing automation to measure marketing effectiveness and optimize ROI by not only tracking each inbound call back to the specific online, mobile or offline source that originated it, but also by routing calls automatically to the right sales agent no matter where they are or what phone device they use.

Ifbyphone’s product suite is emblematic of a holistic approach meeting today’s enterprise demand, a la Salesforce’s model. This includes four main areas (mapping to several individual products): Call tracking, routing, management (i.e. virtual call centers), and customer notification.

“Tracking the call is not enough,” Ifbyphone CEO Irv Shapiro told me. “You need tools to route that call to the optimal party to close a sale; and a third set of tools manage the call once it’s routed. The last leg is outbound customer notification. If you’re running a business engaging customers by phone, we think you need all four.”

Ifbyphone is on a steady growth clip, and has been able to capture lots of business around the above call monetizaiton growth trends. Now, with the new funding it will accelerate this growth by taking a more aggressive sales push.

“Historically we’ve been selling to early adopters that find us,” said Shapiro. “That worked well, reaching 4,000 organizations and hundreds of thousands of customer end points. With funding we’ll deploy a sales force to push the message.”

The post Ifbyphone Lands $9 Million Series D To Accelerate Growth, Sales Push appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

I’m working on a big white paper and forecast on call based monetization — an update to the report we released last year. Phone calls as a lead source are getting more attention in the age of smart phones, and our data indicate that they’re highly valued by businesses, especially in some key verticals.

The space is also heating up as shown by two large funding announcements within a few days of each other. Ifbyphone announced a $9 million series D round on Friday and another big player in the space is announcing funding tomorrow (it’s currently embargoed so I can’t disclose details yet).

I got the chance to catch up with Ifbyphone CEO Irv Shapiro on Friday to talk about the funding and what it means. Those comments and some other activity in the space are included in my monthly Street Fight column, and i’ll do a deeper dive on the Ifbyphone news here later today.

Meanwhile, check out the column excerpt below and you can read the entire thing here. We also did a webcast on the topic recently and you can watch the replay here. Much more to come on this big topic.

We’re seeing tech and media worlds finally come around to what we’ve been saying for years: phone calls are what businesses want. That’s especially true in high value categories like professional services, autos, travel and insurance. Clicks and impressions, despite a sexier image, aren’t as valued in lots of cases.

This notion is getting more attention in the age of smartphones when the search device also makes phone calls. So calling a business post-engagement is intuitive for users, in addition to being valued by businesses. That’s compounded by smartphone users’ high local commercial intent.

These were key inputs in a forecast we did last year (update in progress) that shows $68 billion is spent annually across media on localized ads to generate calls to businesses. Meanwhile, BIA/Kelsey data indicate that 61 percent of SMBs consider phone calls the most valuable form of incoming leads.

But call monetization and its many flavors collide with local beyond just the SMB segment. Like the overall local media opportunity, we can’t forget about national brands and agencies (included in the $68M figure) that target specific local markets. This is also where most mobile-local ad spend comes from.

Call monetization leaders are zeroing in on this national-local opportunity, given the sector’s spending power and evolving localized ad strategies. This is one place Marchex hangs its hat, and is doing very cool things with deep analytics on 300 million annual calls to better derive meaning and ROI.

“Examples are helping a group of hundreds of auto service shops understand how to better close consumer appointments,” Marchex President John Busby told me, “or letting a national home-services brand know which products consumers are calling about; and helping a national travel company understand their return on ad spend from call-based advertising.”

Further evidence of the sector’s growth comes in a set of funding announcements this week. The first is Ifbyphone, which received $9 million led by River Cities Capital, bringing its total funding to $30 million. The second announcement is embargoed (tomorrow) so I can’t disclose, but it’s a $20 million sum.

Read the rest.

The post Are Local Business Phone Leads Sexy Again? 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.

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