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| Local Search & the Impact of Pay Per Call |
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The web search continues to grow at an incredible rate, with new mechanics for sales and marketing being added all the time, such as Pay-per-Call. In this article, we question the impact this will have on the UK market. Analysts and research reports reflect the growing phenomenon of the online world and the impact it is having to consumers every day purchasing habits. This has helped produce the growth of e-commerce with Search Marketing being seen as the most efficient method for traffic, conversions and cost per sale. In a recent report by Future Foundation, it predicted that the online shopping market will be worth £60bn or 20% of all retain spend by 2010. Large corporations have already cashed in on the online opportunities available to them and are seeing healthy returns from Search Marketing including PPC and SEO and other e-commerce communication propositions. However, regional and local firms have yet to really see an opportunity to benefit in on the online opportunities, until now. Local Search in the UK still has little impact on the e-commerce bottom line but this could be about to change with the recent introduction of Pay-per-call. By utilising this relatively new mechanic (a form of response to searching, in that consumers are given a phone number to respond to in addition/instead of a link to click) companies are now monitoring the direct impact of their online efforts - offline. Call centres are being issued with specific phone lines linked with online campaigns to take calls from consumers on insurance products, catalogues and holidays. Regional companies with existing call centres will be able to implement Pay-to-Call to monitor their overall e-commerce campaigns. Indeed, this has also provides a further commercial opportunity in that those who need leads to feed their Sales teams can now use tactical Sponsored Search will benefit from direct leads which will drive down cost of sale. However, whilst Pay Per Call will be of great benefit to those large regional organisations that can support a scalable infrastructure due to their commercial maturity, there is also currently scope for the SME's to capitalise on this recent edition to the Search Marketing Industry as they all have phones that they want to ring. The real opportunity for smaller, more local companies will be Local Search, Pay Per Call. In fact, this potentially, could be huge as the US market is discovering. A recent report from The Kelsey Group, "Calls, Clicks & SMEs: Driving Leads from Web to Phone" estimates that pay-per-call will generate gross revenues of between $1.4 and $4 billion. Sitelynx has developed our own Search2Call product that allows any response based Search Engine Marketing campaign (using Google, MSN or Yahoo) to be paid for by a pre-agreed cost per call rather than the previous cost per click. This is aimed at opening up Paid Search Advertising to the new Sales & Marketing teams of smaller companies who have previously seen Search as something "online companies do". The Search industry is still in the early stages of new mechanics such as Pay-Per-Call but will go a long way to help build the very apparent gap in the SME/Local Search market place. |
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