Miva Pay-Per-Call Review
I’ve spoken a bit about pay-per-call in the past, and I’ve finally had a chance to get some experience in using it, so I thought I’d post up a few initial thoughts after a few weeks of testing.
I’m going to be talking about Miva’s pay-per-call system (powered by Ingenio), which was one of the first PPCall programs to launch in the U.K. (a couple more have sprung up since, but I’m not aware of any that has the reach of Miva’s yet).
Opening an account and designing your ads with Miva are very simple. For your ad you will need a phone number for calls to be directed to, plus the usual description, to entice people to call the number, as you would to get people to click on your ads with pay-per-click. You can also specify the times that you are available, so that you do not receive calls out of hours that you can’t answer.
There is also an option to add some more information about your business to go on a business profile page, which is accessed through a link in your ad - no website addresses are allowed here though, as Miva want to get people to call the phone number given, but you can put your latest offers on there, again to help prompt the searcher to call.
Don’t forget, the number shown in the search engine results page is a Miva number, used so they can track the calls (and charge you!) - don’t have a heart attack like I did thinking they’d put the wrong number on the ad.
Miva’s cost-per-call is currently at a minimum of £2, and because it is in its infancy, there are few advertisers participating, and therefore you are unlikely to have to pay much more than the minimum to get a call. If pay-per-call proves to be successful, expect the cost-per-call to rise dramatically. For the terms that I’m currently interested in, paying £2 to get someone on the phone to talk about the product we offer is nothing - and I wish it would stay like that! One other thing to point out regarding costs is that Miva charge a £10 listing fee for every ad that you submit - I guess this is minimal if you’re only going to show an ad or two, but could really add up if you’ve got a lot of ads to show.
The reporting for Miva’s pay-per-call probably gives you just about all you need - the time of the call, the first few digits of the phone number of the person calling (so you could find out their approximate location, which may be of some use), and also the duration of the call. This in itself can be quite a useful stat as it can give you an indication of whether the call was a valid lead, depending on the type of business you run. You can also see if you’ve had any unanswered calls.
One stat that is missing is the number of impressions the ad has had - this would be useful to see the ratio of impressions to calls.
Although Miva has a reasonable network of partner sites, pay-per-call will come into its own when some of the larger search engines add it into the mix - as far as I’m aware, Yahoo do a similar thing for some of its advertisers through some of their channels, and Google have recently started adding a similar system (although they ring the customer back) in the U.S. too.
It also might prove to be a more suitable means of getting leads businesses in particular industries (such as plumbers, electricians etc.), where the customer needs to talk to a human. Indeed, unlike pay-per-click advertising, you do not even need a website, which makes it perfect for smaller businesses. But in a lot of cases searchers may find it disconcerting to have to pick up the phone.
We’ve not had a great lot of success with our pay-per-call campaign yet, but for the price that we’ll play it is another source of cheap leads, which suits us. Don’t expect it to provide a lot of leads yet, but going forward, the big search engines are likely to create more interest in this form of advertising.
This entry was posted on Monday, December 5th, 2005 at 6:34 pm and is filed under Advertising, Pay-Per-Call. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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