FindWhat.com, a leading developer and provider of pay per click search engine advertising, announced it has entered into an agreement with Ingenio, Inc., provider of search and directory monetization products and services that seamlessly bridge telephony and the Internet.
In recent years, paid search listings have taken an increasing share of online advertisers’ budgets, but have not been an option for businesses without a website. Through the combination of Ingenio’s patented technologies with the FindWhat.com Network(TM), non-web-oriented businesses can now take advantage of online, performance-based marketing opportunities. In addition, Pay Per Call(TM) provides current online businesses another advertising vehicle to generate sales, with the actual connection occurring offline, over the phone, directly with the merchant.
Recently, on FindWhat and other paid search advertising solutions such as Google AdWords and Overture, some advertisers have tried to save on their ads by listing their direct phone numbers in the ad title or description. Since the pay per click platform works only if a viewer clicks on the ad, the advertiser did previously not have to pay if the web searcher simply picked up the phone and made a call. The FindWhat Pay Per Call ad system seems like a fair solution to this dilemma.
Plans call for participating merchants’ Pay Per Call ads to appear in search and directory results whenever a consumer conducts a keyword or keyword phrase query, similar to the appearance of current paid listings in the FindWhat.com Network. The online advertisements will contain special phone numbers, provisioned through the Ingenio Platform, which connect to the merchant’s location. A phone call from a prospective customer, as opposed to a click, will become the true billing event. Under the proposed service, merchants will agree to a Pay Per Call fee based on an open market bidding system, with the top bidder’s Pay Per Call ad appearing first, and all others listed in descending order of their bids. This pricing mechanism will allow each merchant to determine how much they wish to pay based on their goals, budget and lifetime value of their customers.
Business may be interested in such an Internet to Phone type advertising platform. The Ingenio/JupiterResearch findings (March 2004, 336 businesses) indicate that 48% of small businesses surveyed are very/somewhat interested in using Pay Per Call, and that 40% would be very/somewhat likely to allocate new advertising budget dollars to take advantage of this new product.
Under the terms of the agreement, FindWhat.com plans to incorporate Ingenio’s technology, processes and systems to offer the Pay Per Call advertising platform and services to its advertisers, distributed through the FindWhat.com Network. Additionally, FindWhat.com and Ingenio plan to develop and co-market a unified pay-per-click and Pay Per Call solution (PPC2) to companies seeking to utilize both forms of performance-based advertising opportunities.
