House of Tan

PPC (Pay Per Call)

So we all know about and most of us use PPC (as in Pay Per click) but do you know about Pay Per Call?

I decided to actually let the Yellow book guy set up an appointment with me. I am glad I did. They now offer a new system of PPC. The Pay Per Call program works like this:

They set up a new phone number for you in the PPC yellow page ad only (not your standard white page listing). The calls routed through this # are tracked and you pay per calls received. Calls less than 8 seconds are automatically taken off and you can dispute any calls that are from telemarketers, wrong number, ect.

I did a traditional YP ad last year with a special tracking number and yes, people are still using the yellow pages. Now I did notice several weird numbers, hang-ups, current clients, and repeats in the detailed billing. After analysis, we were receiving an average of 10 true, new potential clients calling in. However at $240/mo. and supposing that our scripts worked and 100% of those calls came in; we were spending $24 per client acquisition. So I dropped that in favor of more efficient advertising methods.

I will be meeting with my rep again in 2 weeks to go over rates and such. I assume the higher “bidding” you do will dictate the location and size of the ads.

What are your thoughts?

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kookyguy

This isn't new, at least not around here. The funny thing is the phone book guys do not know about this business.

Our tracked calls starting going up (like 500%) just about 6 weeks before our one year ad deal was about to expire. The funny thing is, this was in Oct, our slowest month of the year for tanning.

This was about 10 years ago. But it wasn't hard to figure out they were padding the calls to our business.

Make sure you are not just getting some BS calls, but look for people coming in from them.

No one uses the Yellow pages anymore!

House of Tan

People do still use the book; I thought the same as you until I found out (with proof) that some still do.

When you say that it has been around for awhile, are you talking about tracked phone numbers or PPC?

With this "new" system, you pay no monthly charge except the calls.

I agree with you on the padding, thus why detailed billing and review of such is a must.

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kookyguy

We had ppc 10 years ago. We stopped all phone book advertising about 8-9 years ago. These days you will get fewer than 1% of your customers from phone book advertising, at least around here.

kookyguy

Sure, some folks still look in the phone book, I mean some one is reading any and every publication at some point. it is a dead medium these days. Not worth putting money into.

parrot head

I remember when the yellowbook was a book in itself. Now the white pages and yellow pages are in one book, at least around here. The yellow page rep doesn't even stop anymore, they call once a year to see if you want to advertise.

House of Tan

Currently I have the top 3 spots on Google, Bing and Yahoo for the key words related to what I do; so I get your point to a degree as most of my people come in from organic search results and it costs me next to nothing.

However, if I am only paying for real, truly new clients at a cost of $5-$10 per head; an extra 120 new clients is… well an extra 120 new clients. I only bring in around 1,000 new heads a year so for me it would be closer to 10% of my new client funnel.

To me the question is, if I am not in the book would these 120 or so people just call the next salon in the book or would they also be on line and I would pick up the majority of them anyway?

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BuyersGroup

If you are interested in this angle I would look at the blended companies. These companies will do a blended call and click marketing campaign which is easily tracked using unique URLs for your ppc and unique phone numbers as well.

The obvious drawback to a call per click is how do they find the number to call? Makes no sense to me.

I am not getting your results for your web rankings don't forget that most browsers will favor a given search once made unless you are blasting your temp folders every time you logoff and never searching while logged into gmail/outlook as they mess with your searches also using your known history. I have not found a homestead or any other site builder system in good rankings yours is not in top 30 doing a local search from a never searched you IP... Just a thought to do more research. If you don't rank under tanning salon then that's not good

House of Tan

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BuyersGroup

On the spray tan specifics you rank 3rd behind I guess your main competition.

Not wanting to rank on tanning which is what 999 out of 1000 folks wanting a spray tan will google is complete lunacy and your competition ranks OK under the tanning searches. You don't appear to be up against any serious websites so with some effort you could rank well in all spectrums.

Also I forgot to email you the adwords settings also should be zipcode target. I see this all the time. Why would you want someone in Philly seeing your adwords ad? Another thing to look at is on your place page you can now zipcode target which helps you gain placement in google + searches which are going to be important I predict as plus is awesome when compared to fb and more folks will find this over time.