Subscribe to the Feed!« Personal Branding - an amazing interview with Joel Bauer | Marketing Home Page | MySpace Marketing Still Work? Getting a “Guru’s” Attention… »
Beware!!! Biased Companies “Research” Supports Product…Part 2 - Pay-Per-Call?? The Click Fraud Solution???
By Los Angeles Internet Marketing | October 16, 2007
Thanks for Dropping By! I'd love to learn more about you, so why don't you join my MyBlogLog Community and say "Hi"?
I was going to do a post on Yahoo’ s smartads press releases, as well as the Atlas’s Research that conveniently came up right beforehand. Hmm… both services not in as much in the SEM field as much as in the…. you got it - banner and rich media advertising… Hmmm correlation?
(Unfortunately, that idea seems to have fallen flat. The sad part is, that although the concept was a good one - someone in PR at Yahoo just doesn’t know how to promote it. It will remain a little gold mine for the marketer that cares.)
Now, far be it from me to suggest conspiracry theories. I really don’t give a darn (heck, I self promote too). My only point is that some of these “research papers”, while stating true fact, are a little biased in mentioning importance. (I will discuss this in a later post… maybe part 3…) There is alot to it.
The post that caught my attention was one from John Federman , the CEO of eStara. When I saw his post in “Performance Insider”, I thought that he would talk about other relevant metrics.
Instead, he goes on to quote a Kelsey research report about the internet model going from one of CPC to Cost Per Lead / Action.
Then he ties in tracking calls to the keyword (something my company has struggled with in the past… creating an engine that generates one of 10 phone numbers, and then tracing it by time to IP address and keyword? not practical). From there he shares a vision of eventually having a pay per call model.
Interestingly enough, he’s the CEO of a company who does…. drumroll please… Pay Per Call. Now, if I meet John by a convention, I will be happy to interact with him… so John, please don’t take this personally. But…
I think that we have had enough of the “magic” of pay per call… The AOL Ingenio deal just hasn’t given the proper amount of people calling, and it’s not cost effective.
I think that there are many more important metrics online than just tracking the call to the keyword, and frankly, I’m a bit surprised that you titled your article as a solution to click fraud - and on the way to pay per action.
I’m not arguing that tracking sales down to a call is not critical. If we could have known which keywords drove calls instead of which keywords drove the filling out of a form, we’d gladly take the phone call.
I’m also not arguing that you should not push click to call, or tracking calls / sales down to the keyword. It is a great solution, and eStara, as a company that is into click-to-call shoud definitely be pushing it.
The only thing I am trying to point out for readers of the blog that you have a little bias towards using pay-per-call in any solution that you suggest to “the internet’s problems”. That might just be coming into play when you suggest pay-per-call as the “next biggest thing”.
But hey, keep that vision, share it with others, and it might just happen.
Share This
Topics: Company Marketing Techniques, Mentchlichkeit, ppc, cpa, Marketing Basics, Yahoo, MSN Adcenter, Pay Per Click Advice, CEO's Lessons, Google, Search Engine Marketing |
November 2nd, 2007 at 6:46 am
[…] I am openminded. I just think the entire issue has been blown out of proportion, just like click fraud. […]
December 13th, 2007 at 7:39 pm
[…] demographic data in their search marketing, Yahoo has introduced smartads (Check out my paranoid post about the Yahoo Smartads “Conspiracy”), and now ebay’s got smartads […]