Pay Per Call? (Superpages)

[Saodavi]

Today I was solicited by the peeps at Verizon who want me to spend more on some huge ad in they Yellow Pages. Of course I'm not doing it because it costs too much ($5000 for a color dollar-bill-sized ad?) and last year I didn't make any money from their print ads.

Then the sales rep told me that I should be in the "Superpages.com" website. She had all kinds of nice looking numbers and stats and stuff. They'll slice it up any number of ways but it all boils down to one of the following:

1) paid placement. The more you pay, the closer you'll be to the top of the list.
2) pay per click. They'll charge you $$$ (more than google) for people who click on your link
3) pay per call. They put a special number in for your business and you have to pay a certain amount each time someone calls you.

So, my question is, has anyone had any experience with the Verizon SuperPages? Also, has anyone ever used a pay-per-call approach? I'll admit that I'm not super hot on this idea but I wanted to get some additional info before telling them to take a hike.

[RonnieG]

I have a SuperPages free ad (only one allowed per customer, I think), and it places well for lots of RE keywords in many communities in my market area. The SuperPages rep that called me after I set up the free ad and tried to sell me on paid ads gave up when I stepped her through some typical RE searches and my ad came out #1 or #2 every time.

[mmedia]

How much did they want for the Pay per call? That certainly sounds like it makes more sense than paid for placement.

[Saodavi]

Well it's laid out a little like Google. But instead of two sponsored links at the top, they have about 7 from advertisers. Then, the following 8 links are paid placement. It can be pay-per-call or pay-per-click. You set a monthly budget and an amount you want to pay for your ranking. To be in the top position, the current bid is $4.20 per call. That seems pretty steep. I can bid less but I'll be on the back pages. They also don't appear to have any "long tail" keywords. It's categorized like the Yellow Pages so that's about the level of detail you can have in the search.

[Saodavi]

ps - they used that old line of "Well if all your competitors are doing it, it must be working. They wouldn't be spending that kind of money if they weren't seeing results."

That's the most un-scientific imprecise method of calculating your advertising investment I've ever heard of. I'm a little insulted that 1) they're that stupid or 2) they think I'm that stupid.

[mmedia]

I guess at $4.20 a call you'd have to have a strategy to really jump on the calls. Really though I'm surprised it's so cheap. They must not convert very well. You'd think out of say 100 calls ($420) that you'd get at least 10 really good leads and maybe 3 closes? Maybe apples to oranges but phone calls in the mortgage world go for $20-$50 / call.

[Ted S]

Pay Per Call is an emerging form of advertising and as such, the pricing (and interest) is always changing. Then the product first launched sites charged a lot for it, but with only one data-point (phone number) and virtually no information for the consumer (i.e. just a short text ad) there's not a lot of prequalification and no way to really validate the lead quality. As such there's been a lot of back and forth about the fees -- Google has beta tested their own system twice, and I'm told they'll launch it again in the future -- but there's a lot of bumps to workout in the process.

That said, a phone call is a whole lot closer to a sale than a click and at 4.80 per call, it sounds like something worth testing, if only with a small media spend. In my experience with pay per call systems there were always decent results and decent quality so even if it takes a few more calls to generate a close than normal, the cost may be low enough to offset the difference.