Verizon SuperPages.com will begin carrying pay-per-call ads in its online listings by the end of next month, the company announced today. Verizon also intends to include pay-per-call distribution in a
wireless search function, as well as its printed Yellow Pages books. For both the online and print ads, marketers will bid on the keywords or categories in which they wish their phone numbers to
appear.
"We have the ability to leverage the entire Verizon platform," said Eric Chandler, Verizon SuperPages.com's vice president of e-commerce and marketing. "We're going to use all our
different distribution capabilities, starting with the printed directory and moving on to the wireless."
The inclusion of pay-per-call ads--which allow merchants to pay for a phone lead rather
than a referral to a Web site--into the print Yellow Pages is slated for the fourth quarter of this year. Ads in certain categories will be accompanied by 800 numbers; when users call those numbers,
the call will be redirected to the phone number of the top bidder for that category's keyword, until their budget is spent; then it moves to the next on the list.
Kelsey Group analyst Greg
Sterling said the inclusion of the Internet pay-per-call ads into an offline publication shows how much online advertising is gaining acceptance, even among old-school media. "That single decision is
interesting because there have been pay-per-call experiments in the past, but this shows the influence of performance-based ads on the Internet--that it's starting to move in on the 'real' world," he
said.
Verizon's pay-per-call service will be operated on a bid model, much like most pay-per-click ad services. The pay-per-call ads and the pay-per-click ads that Verizon offers, however, will
be integrated into one bidding market, so that pay-per-call buyers will compete with their pay-per-click counterparts. According to Chandler, the calls will be converted to clicks--for example, if in
one category, five clicks convert to one call, a call bid will have to be five times higher than a click bid to overbid and grab the top spot.
Verizon will use its 3,000-strong sales force to
push the product out to local business owners who may not yet be net-savvy. "One of the challenges with all these products in the local market is educating," said Sterling. "That's an important asset
that will probably allow this product to penetrate at a more rapid rate than if it was a self-service product."