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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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.

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Marchex has just released some intriguing stats that align with research we’re currently conducting for call monetization. Specifically, the company reports that SMBs lose half a billion dollars annually to a seldom-discussed problem: spam calls.

As Marchex’s Ziad Ismail demonstrated at our December Leading in Local: Interactive Local Media conference, this can be telemarketers, robo-calls, or a newer form of “call fraud” that involves masked voices that keep a proprietor on the line for more than 30 seconds.

Why would they do that? So that SMBs get charged for that call under many pay-per-call platforms that charge advertisers for calls of a certain duration. This is parallel to what developed in the search world years ago for “click fraud.”

But unlike clicks, which don’t eat up SMBs’ time, calls occupy time-strapped proprietors which results in real opportunity cost. In other words, time spent with telemarketers or giving directions is time away from revenue generating activity.

From our call monetization white paper last year (new edition underway):

There is virtually no incremental cost to accepting more clicks, beyond the imperceptibly small increase in machine capacity and bandwidth. Bad telephone calls, however, are a tax on a business’ resources. These include solicitations, job seekers, mundane questions like directions and hours, service requests and misdials, to name a few. Bad calls waste time. Fortunes are made by those who find new ways to save people time.

The real issue with low-quality calls is the opportunity cost of missing a good customer. Imagine you run a small business. Four lines are ringing. One line is likely a new customer, but which one? Non-productive calls steal time from real paying customers. As call volumes increase with smartphone traffic, everyone is going to see an increase in dumb calls.

Big problems lead to big opportunities. For this reason, we will see an entirely new industry created around call analytics analysis to find, route and promote high-quality calls and their sources on one end of the spectrum. At the other will be the ability to demote and exclude calls that are non-productive. Call analytics will define the winners and losers in this new market.

This entire problem is underscored in light of the growth in call monetization. Mobile search and smartphone penetration are causing tech and media to world’s realize the opportunity to drive phone calls to SMBs (which they value).

We’ve reported that $68 billion is spent annually on advertising with the purpose of driving phone — a number that’s growing quickly in mobile media, given user intent and the inherent capability of the hardware to make phone calls.

But with this growth comes things like call spam, which has grown 162% in the past year. Companies like Marchex have responded with platforms that better gauge quality calls beyond just call duration and other traditional metrics.

We’re currently working on an update to the aforementioned white paper, given the emergence of activity around call monetization. We’ll revisit all of these opportunities and the current best practices and technologies in development. Stay tuned.

The post Marchex PSA: Small Businesses Lose Half a Billion Dollars Annually to Spam Calls 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.

At Leading in Local: Interactive Local Media Dec. 10-12 in San Francisco, we are presenting 50 of local’s top players. Want some homework? We’ve pulled recent coverage of some of our speakers from our Local Media Watch blog. There’s plenty of great reading here, and you’ll experience — first hand — how fast things have been changing.

Patrick Barry, GM, Intuit/DemandForce
Intuit Acquires Online Scheduler

Matthew Berk, CEO, Lucky Oyster
Matthew Berk Rethinks WOM via Lucky Oyster

Brian Boland, VP, Facebook
Facebook/Google Vertical Wars: Facebook Grabs a Google Auto Exec

Suzanne Cooper, Managing Editor, SF Chronicle
SF Chronicle’s Cooper: The Fight to Save Journalism

Jeremy Geiger, CEO, Retailigence
Closed Loop Mobile Local Shopping: A Conversation with Retailigence

Dan Hight, SVP, xAd
XAd and Posterscope: Retargeting For The Real World

Ziad Ismail, SVP, Marchex
Marchex Maps Call Monetization Genome

Mark Roberge, SVP, Hubspot
BIA-Kelsey Briefing: Hubspot Points to a New Way of Selling

Chris Schroeder, Author , Startup Rising
Bookshelf: Christopher Schroeder’s Startup Rising

Sean Smyth, VP, Groupon
A Look at Groupon’s New Partner Network

Eckart Walther, CEO, CardSpring
Merchants Drive Their Own Transaction Marketing via Cardspring Connect

The post Reading List: Recent Blog Coverage of LIL: ILM Speakers appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Marchex announced two new products today, meant to further clarify attribution for successful call-based ad campaigns. Known respectively as Call DNA and Dynamic Tracking, they both work towards clearer advertising ROI, and iterative campaign optimization.

This basically comes down to insights on which calls convert to sales. The goal here is to lower customer acquisition costs and bring in more high value leads. Analytics to determine quality calls is vital for call based marketing and this is the latest addition for Marchex.

The new offerings join the company’s existing Call Analytics platform. From today’s press release:

Call DNA provides:

— A simple, easy-to-understand visual of what happens on phone calls using automated call scoring technology.

— A break-down of what leads to improved sales and overall business performance.

Dynamic Tracking provides:

— Details on what, exactly, triggered a phone call from a mobile consumer to an advertiser. This includes specific keywords, ad impressions and Web-based sessions.

— Easy campaign optimization to drive more calls from new customers.

This has implications for improving ongoing call-based ad campaigns, given that campaign attributes are evaluated in greater detail. For example, the keywords and impressions that lead to quality calls are made more transparent, and in an automated way.

The automation point is important in call tracking, given that businesses of all sizes can’t spend time pouring over call recordings and decipher the data on their own. Speaking of time-saved, the objective — in addition to more effective campaigns — is operational efficiencies.

In other words, the intelligence gathered from call analytics can enable predictive modeling to route incoming warm leads to the best sales reps. Similarly, bad calls can be routed to IVR systems rather than eat up valuable time for big call centers and SMBs alike.

These concepts aren’t new for Marchex and others that play in this space, but today’s announcement further boost the ability to improve margins for companies that acquire business over the phone. That’s of course a growing population in today’s mobile world.

“Up until this point, people have associated long-lasting calls with high-quality calls. But that’s like equating a long line at a store with happy customers,” Ziad Ismail, SVP of Product & Engineering at Marchex told BIA/Kelsey. “Call DNA goes beyond this flawed metric of call duration. It lets advertisers understand what is happening on phone calls at scale, so they know exactly what’s working well with their process and what isn’t.”

(click to enlarge)

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During a Webinar yesterday, BIA/Kelsey’s Senior Analyst Mike Boland, along with Marchex VP of Operations Travis Fairchild and Head of SEM Cody Kunning discussed how businesses and those managing online and mobile advertising campaigns can best maximize performance with Google’s AdWords Enhanced Campaigns, which are set to kick off on July 22nd.

Enhanced Campaigns is a topic that has been talked about quite a bit over the last few months. It was discussed at BIA/Kelsey’s Leading In Local conference in March (read Leading In Local 2013: Enhanced Campaigns: Google Speaks), and Mikel Boland has written about it extensively (see Google “Enhances” Cross-Platform SEM: What Does it Mean? and More on Google’s Paid Search “Enhancements”: The SMB Angle)

Marchex brought additional firepower to the discussion. Fairchild, Kunning and team have spent the last several months testing hundreds of customer campaigns on the new AdWords Enhanced platform. Here are some of the key takeaways that advertisers must be aware of:

1. Do not wait to begin testing.. Boland, Fairchild and Kunning stressed throughout the Webinar that testing is critical to understanding how these changes will impact the way your advertising budget gets allocated. Google’s Enhanced Campaigns rolls out on July 22, 2013. The changes being made to AdWords are significant. If you fail to get the support you need now, you run the risk of wasting valuable advertising dollars when Enhanced Campaigns is launched.

2. Why is Google doing this? For advertisers, the new features should have some benefits and make management less manual. But one of the main reasons is that mobile advertiser adoption is accelerated through Enhanced Campaigns, because advertisers are faced with forced inclusion in mobile for all AdWords campaigns. This should help correct what Google sees as an imbalance between time spent in mobile and actual mobile advertising (see chart below). Google should see additional revenue from these changes as well. Supply and demand has kept mobile ad rates depressed. Greater mobile adoption, and higher performing mobile ad campaigns should help increase rates.

3. You will lose some of the ability you had to manage advertising by device. However, there are ways around this. Google has announced a mobile bid modifier, for example, that allows you to still run detail mobile campaigns. There also are geographic bid modifiers. Marchex recommends that advertisers locate the trigger points for budget allocation in order to gain some control over targeting by device. You will not be able to set a separate budget, as in the past, so how you set up your account will be key. This is why BIA/Kelsey and Marchex recommend you get started now. The learning curve is unavoidable.

4. Enhanced Campaigns require time for setup, familiarity, and the advertiser must know where customers convert and what they convert on. Device type, ad copy, device type landing pages, device type extensions are some of the key items. In addition to becoming proficient with setup, using third-party tools for tracking will be very important.

5. Call analytics is even more important than ever before, especially if you want to reduce volatility in CPL.

6. Both BIA/Kelsey and Marchex anticipate that CPCs in competitive verticals will increase after Google Enhanced Campaigns launches for three reasons. Reason 1: Advertisers will arbitrarily inflate mobile ad mods w/out analyzing return on spend to try to gain position. Reason 2: Advertisers will not properly optimize for quality score per device. Reason 3: Advertisers will not properly bucket keywords into similar bid ad groups to use mobile modifiers effectively.

7. Lastly, because Google’s Enhanced Campaigns will likely bring about CPC increases and potential headaches for advertisers, there is some potential for Bing to gain some market share from Google. Some advertisers have started to deploy more with Bing and have achieved favorable ROI. Boland, Fairchild and Kunning all agreed that increased competition can only help improve services and results for customers. However, it remains to be seen if Bing can make significant headway against Google.

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Register for BIA/Kelsey’s Leading In Local: SMB Digital Marketing, which takes place Sept. 11 – 13 in Austin. The program digs deep into the highest ROI for SMBs (and profits for their solution providers), and provides a first-hand look at the latest innovations and influential players in SMB-driven search, video, social media, mobile, promotions, CRM and reputation management. Register rates increase as the conference date nears, so take advantage of early pricing and register today.

Below Is The CoverItLive Twitter Coverage From The Webinar

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Today at BIA/Kelsey’s Leading in Local Conference, John Busby, VP, Marchex Institute, shared some compelling data about mobile calls and conversion rates. Busby kicked off the “Mobile Superforum” that capped off a busy morning here in Boston.

Busby shared that, somewhat surprisingly, male mobile callers stay on phone for 7:23, while female mobile callers hang on the line for a relatively brief 6:30. Perhaps less surprisingly, male callers hang on the line longer in the auto, bankruptcy and locksmith categories. Apparently broke men frequently lock themselves out of their houses and cars. Female callers tend to talk longer with businesses in real estate, education and pest control.

These kinds of insights have some practical use, for example, in figuring out different approaches to handling calls and determining different interactive voice responses to use for different callers.

Busby addressed the old criticism that you cannot measure mobile users because there are no cookies in mobile. Busby contends a phone call is best indication of intent. Additionally, the phone number itself provides a lot of info, for example demographics can be discerned based on area code and exchange.

Busby says there is an opportunity in “call rescue. ” The average unanswered rate among SMBs is more than 20 percent. Call rescue  routes a call unlikely to be answered to someone who will answer the phone.

Busby also shared data showing how strong conversion is among mobile callers. “When consumers are invested in researching a product on their smartphone, they are very interested in buying. It keeps coming up in the data,” he said.  “When they convert, they typically convert within an hour.”

Busby also shared some conversion metrics by category. Marchex uses analysis of call recordings to discern ROI.

For multifamily housing, 25 percent who call mention the words “lease” or “contract” (these are keywords that signal conversion).

In the autos category, more than 70 percent of product/service calls to dealers include mention of the make and model, and more than 40 percent give the dealer their contact details. These are also strong conversion signals.

For travel, conversion is consistently more than 25 percent for rental cars and 20 percent for hotels.

To get quality calls from mobile display it takes 494,104 impressions, 2,481 clicks, and just 29 calls to generate one high quality call.

The post LIL 2013: Mobile Superforum appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

SMB marketing companies have forgotten that local businesses still see calls as a key driver of new business. That’s the opinion expressed by Marchex Executive VP Matthew Berk during today’s session on “Converting Calls to Local Sales.” To succeed in the calls space, Berk emphasized the need to “go deep” and focus on quality. He defines quality calls as those that represent a proxy to conversion.

Key takeaways on emerging industry trends include:

–The explosion of mobile is about being call-ready

–Mobile search and discovery coincides with smartphone penetration, growing 5x in the past two years

–Computers are becoming more and more like telephones (i.e., Skype and Gtalk)

–Lower cost per lead + better outcomes = lower churn.

–Better outcomes means better calls

The post ILM West: Merchants Want Consumers to Pick Up the Phone appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Marchex announced a new partnership with CityGrid today that will expand the Seattle company’s call advertising business to local websites such as Citysearch, Urbanspoon and Insider Pages. CityGrid Media will place Marchex’s national and local advertisers in relevant call placements across its ad network. CityGrid owns and operates Urbanspoon, Insider Pages and Citysearch. The new arrangement will connect Marchex to consumers when they are looking for products or services.

Through Marchex’s technology platform, advertisers pay for the live customer connection on a performance pricing model. Ultimately, advertisers will use the call analytics to help them better understand the value of each call. We reported Marchex’s acquisition of Jingle Networks earlier this year. After a revenue increase of 81 percent in its second quarter, Marchex is also hiring more staff.

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