How Publishers Can Build Better Pay-Per-Call Traffic

Generating calls is not the hard part. Generating calls that buyers want to keep buying, month after month, is a different discipline entirely.

The publishers who last in pay-per-call are rarely the ones with the highest raw volume. They are the ones whose traffic behaves predictably against a buyer's campaign requirements.

Read the campaign before you send a single call

Requirements vary by vertical, geography and individual campaign. Two roofing campaigns in the same network can have different geographies, different answering hours and different minimum durations.

Sending traffic against assumptions rather than the written requirements is the fastest way to burn a campaign and your reputation with it.

Set expectations before the call connects

The quality of a call is largely decided before it rings. If your creative promises something the buyer does not offer, the call will be short, the consumer will be frustrated and the buyer will see a poor result.

• Describe the service accurately rather than in the broadest possible terms
• Make the geography obvious so out-of-area consumers self-select out
• Be clear about what will happen when the consumer calls
• Avoid implying pricing, approval or eligibility you cannot stand behind

The cheapest way to raise call quality is to stop generating the calls that were never going to qualify.

Respect the buyer's clock

A call that arrives outside a buyer's answering hours is close to worthless to both sides. Pacing traffic to the hours a campaign can actually take calls improves connection rates without changing anything about your sources.

This is one of the simplest improvements available to most publishers, and one of the most consistently overlooked.

Treat compliance as part of the product

Consent, disclosure and how a consumer arrived at the call matter to buyers, and they should matter to you. Traffic that creates a compliance problem for a buyer does not stay in a network for long, whatever its volume.

Measure what buyers measure

Buyers look at connection rate, call duration and conversion. If you track the same three numbers by source, you will usually find that a small number of sources drag the average down.

Cutting those sources will reduce your volume and increase your value, and in pay-per-call the second number is the one that keeps campaigns open.