Leads are coming from everywhere, and the digital marketing firms have adjusted to this reality. ReachLocal, for one, has now opened up its ReachEdge lead conversion and marketing automation software. It now has the capability to track leads and other activity from a wide variety of unassociated marketing sources.

Chief Product Officer Kris Barton briefed BIA/Kelsey on ReachEdge’s evolution, noting that the company’s efforts to increase transparency and simplicity will ultimately boost conversion rates. Barton says that “decoupling” the software is the direct result of customer input. Some customers, for instance, had invested in redesigned website and didn’t want to have to abandon it in order to sign up with Reach.

The new version of ReachEdge is $149 a month and includes a free trial. It also features plug-ins for publishing systems such as WordPress and Drupal. The software has also been enhanced for mobile. Customers can use their phones to receive emails and text alerts. It also has integrated reports that are “focused entirely on ROI” and are much clearer than Google Analytics, says Barton.

The post ReachLocal Now Captures SMB Leads from Across the Web 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.

___________

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

The post Skinny Jeans and Click-to-Call, A Natural Pair 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.

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.

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 culminates in a massive 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 the “Pay-per-call” aspects 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.”

As a teaser, check out an excerpt from the paper below. It should be out in the next couple weeks and we’re excited to start engaging over the analysis. It will also be a key topic in our 2014 conference series, starting with our Leading in Local show next month.  Stay tuned for more.

Call Monetization: The Main Course
So far we’ve detailed the massive market opportunity in driving calls to businesses, and introduced terms like “call monetization” and “call based ad market.” But what exactly do we mean by call monetization, and what comprises the call based ad market?

“Click to call” — and its monetization structure “pay-per-call” — is the most common association with call monetization. Google’s work in this area has driven the phrase into the mainstream consciousness (as can happen when Google enters new areas).

Other local media and ad players are innovating in different ways to drive calls to local advertisers, including xAd and Local Corporation. More broadly, the interest and excitement around phone leads is even compelling companies like Twitter into the space.

Specifically, Twitter is testing a click to call button with a few of its brand advertisers. Using its expandable card-based format for multimedia within promoted Tweets, these call buttons will show up in similar fashion to “click to subscribe” buttons seen previously.

There are other components meanwhile developing to unlock value in call monetization, such as call tracking and analytics. There’s predictive modeling to determine caller intent and route calls accordingly — for instance to an automated system versus a live person.

These are all important and growing areas we’ll detail in the sections below. It’s important to see how they come together in a “whole is greater than the sum of its parts” manner. As these areas develop, they are fusing together in more holistic ways.

Pay-Per-Call

Pay-per-call has existed for years in traditional media such as newspapers and Yellow Pages. Dedicated metered numbers track and attribute calls back to a given ad campaign, or even a given placement within a campaign. Advertisers can often be charged per call.

Today, call tracking not only measures calls, but “call quality” based on variables like call source, keyword spotting and other factors described in the following section on “call tracking.” At more basic levels, call frequency and duration can be proxies for quality.

Pay-per-call has evolved in step with digital media like search. As noted earlier, search’s high-intent use case aligns with the consumer need to make phone calls to qualify purchase decisions. Search also supports and co-exists with calls as a “lower funnel” user activity.

But during search marketing’s tenure on the desktop, conducting calls was cumbersome for users given that the PC and the phone are physically separated. Beyond the tech savvy minority using Skype, there was little direct connection between search results and calls.

But the smartphone has since come along to fuse the search device to the calling device for a more intuitive handoff between the two activities. Hardware aside, the high intent nature of mobile searchers explored above drives higher quality billable leads to businesses.

This has all created an environment ripe for mobile pay per call. Phone numbers in search results and local apps like Yelp and YP mobile are hyperlinked to launch phone calls. Many of these apps have responded in turn by charging advertisers for calls driven from the app.

This can happen on per-call basis, usually powered by companies like Marchex or Telmetrics that work with publishers and advertisers. It can also be positioned as an incentive to buy into a premium subscription-based ad package that’s proposed to drive higher call volumes.

Currently, many online marketing and presence products (websites, social media, local listings, and email marketing) employ the latter. Call monetization in these cases happens in more of an indirect way through subscription service. Yelp is one example.

In either case, several models developing to monetize calls show high value leads resulting from mobile search, app usage, and overall mobile engagement. Analytics providers such as Marchex can qualify ROI in more granular ways, as explored further below.

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

We’ll hear about the industry’s shift to leads-based selling from Dex One, No Problem, MediaTrust and Skype. Is this a business model shift that will sustain the Yellow Pages, especially in major markets, over the long term?

The premise behind the shift to leads-based selling in Yellow Pages is that publishers still are among the best at driving quality leads, but the perceived value of their product is perhaps at an alltime low. By shifting the discussion with SMBs from specific products to the ability to drive measurable leads, sales will improve, so the argument goes.

Stephen Gibbons of Dex will kick off the discussion, giving us the view from the sole directory publisher on the panel and how Dex is incorporating leads-based selling into its model. No Problem and MediaTrust will provide the platform provider angle, showing us how they’re making cost-per-click, cost-per-lead and cost-per-acquisition models work for media companies. No Problem will discuss its real-time lead bidding approach offering a unique view on driving leads-based revenues. Skype will round out the panel, sharing how it is leveraging its position as a leading online phone service to drive leads (calls) to advertisers via its partnership model with players such as European Directories and Marchex. Another player to take a look at while at the show is sponsor Akesios, which also has a lead-based selling platform and has worked with European Directories as a partner on the Skype application.

Be sure not to miss this opportunity to hear mini case-studies of why these leading companies see leads-based selling as crucial to their businesses or to helping your business now. We’ll treat you to a cocktail at the reception right after the panel.

4:45 p.m. – 5:30 p.m. — Leads-Based Selling: Salvation or False Hope?
These days, it’s hard to find a publisher that admits to being in the Yellow Pages business. Instead, the narrative is all about being in the business of delivering quality leads to small-business customers. So what does this really mean, in practical terms? How does the transition to a leads-based business affect sales, systems, revenues and profitability? Ultimately, the question is whether the movement to leads-based selling is a fundamental shift in the business or just clever marketing. We’ll ask those who are in the midst of the shift to explain how it all works.

Trip Foster, VP Marketing, MediaTrust
Stephen Gibbons, VP of Marketing, Urban Strategies, Dex One
Daniel Shaked, Founder and CEO, No Problem
Andy Sims, Global Director of Advertising, Skype

The post DMS ’10 Hot Topic Preview: Leads-Based Selling appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Vertical businesses that have relied on Yellow Pages and newspapers and other classified channels aren’t always seeing the same performance-based results that they might expect in the Google age. But many of them also aren’t likely to become keyword experts, or spend a lot of time managing their accounts. That’s always the SMB dilemma, right?

That’s what Reply.com is focused on. The two-year-old, 125-person company, backed by $17 million of venture capital, provides vertical advertisers with “enhanced click” packages and validated leads, complete with leads scoring. In addition, advertisers using Reply.com’s auction-based system can filter locations, and put caps on spending and cost-per-click rates.

Vertical segments targeted by Reply.com include key leads categories, including home insurance, health insurance, life insurance, education, auto finance, mortgage, used cars and auto insurance. Auto and real estate segments make up the biggest segments, with 60 percent to 70 percent of Reply’s customer base. Under Reply’s system, each category is customized for the particular aspects of a vertical.

One key differentiator is that the targeted categories are typically not “inventory based.” They may be new cars, rather than used cars; mortgage, or pure relocation leads, rather than search-based rentals leads.

Reply CEO Payem Zamani suggests that Reply’s clicks and lead offers are more efficiently processed than typical ad exchanges, in part due to narrowing the market base with geotargeting and a system for discerning consumer intent. The company is processing 9 million clicks per month, and 1.58 million leads, with customers for its auctions including auto manufacturers, major media companies such as Hearst Newspapers, and vertical sites such as RealEstate.com and Autobytel. The company also works with several of the search engines, SEO sites and e-mail providers.

The basic idea is to create a “Google-like” platform for acquiring traffic, says Zamani. Reply’s knowledge of user intent and location — driven in part by the installation of a pixel to track users — really streamlines the process and drives higher conversion rates, he says. Conversion success depends on how deep the advertiser wants to go. Information that goes all the way through to consumer credit cards for purchase will be a small fraction (maybe 0.1 percent) of more general conversions (30 percent to 40 percent) that provide additional information.

Reply.com COO Sean Fox is a featured speaker at Marketplaces 2010, March 22-24 in San Diego.

The post Reply.com: Applying Leads, Performance to Key Verticals appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.