AOL launches Pay Per Call

Posted: April 15, 2005

AOL will feature Ingenio ads on regular search results. This will be the first major distribution deal for Ingenio.

Pay Per Call works very similar to Pay Per Click - a business only pays when a call is in place. Ingenio has informed us that they have quite a few quality control specs in place. For instance, a call won’t be charged if it’s under a certain number of seconds. Also, under some conditions they’ll be able to tell if an answering machine picked up and then not charge the call as well.

However, the business also won’t know by picking up the phone if the call is coming through AOL or just another phone call. Ingenio played with some ‘whisper’ technology to let the business know the phone call was originating from an Ingenio ad, but the added few seconds created a scenario where many callers hung up before the call was connected.

This will lead to advertisers having to login to the Ingenio system to see when they’re receiving phone calls, and then try to correlate reported phone call times with actual calls into the business.

There are quite a few bugs to be worked out as to how measuring the value of this service, but there is a lot of potential in this arena for a small business advertiser.

Related Links:
Ingeno’s Home Page
AOL Search Engine

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