In the ever-evolving world of digital marketing, businesses are always on the lookout for new ways to attract more leads that will convert into sales. One approach that’s been gaining significant traction lately is pay-per-call marketing.
In this article, we’ll explore the fundamentals of pay-per-call marketing, its importance, and where the industry is headed.
What is pay-per-call marketing?
Pay-per-call (PPC) is a performance-based marketing model in which affiliate marketers (publishers) are compensated for every qualified call they generate for advertisers (offer owners).
You can think of pay-per-call marketing as a form of lead generation, where instead of being paid on simple lead submits, you are paid on the amount of qualified calls.
A qualified call is essentially any call that meets specific criteria set by the advertiser beforehand. This can include factors such as call duration, caller location, and more.
Inbound pay-per-call campaigns are the most common within the industry. In this scenario, the prospective customer is the one who calls the advertiser.
Is pay-per-call marketing profitable?
Finding high-quality leads remains a top challenge for businesses today. In fact, 44% of sales reps report being dissatisfied with the quality of leads they receive.
This is why more and more businesses are willing to pay a lot of money for qualified, high-value leads, making this a very lucrative opportunity for affiliates.
However, generating high quality leads is more difficult than most traditional affiliate marketing methods. It requires a deep understanding of how pay-per-call marketing works, where to find the best offers to promote, which channels to use to generate leads, and how to track your campaigns in order to optimize them for better results.
We’ll cover everything in this article!
How does pay-per-call marketing work?
The most simplified explanation of how pay-per-call marketing works is that a buyer (advertiser/business) pays you (the affiliate/publisher) for each qualified call.
As an affiliate marketer, it would be very time-consuming to look for businesses that are interested in pay-per-call advertising, reach out to them, and arrange a deal on a one-by-one basis. This is why most affiliates join a pay-per-call affiliate network or affiliate program (more on this later).
Various advertisers who need help to generate leads for their offer will create their pay-per-call campaign on the network.
Through your affiliate network, you will be able to see all available offers, and apply for the ones you would like to promote.
You can promote these offers on different ad networks (e.g., Google, Facebook, Taboola) and encourage viewers to call the number of the advertiser.
Through a unique tracking number, the advertiser can assign all inbound calls you generated to you, and pay you a commission for all calls that fulfil the qualifying criteria.
What type of offers work best for pay-per-call marketing?
Generally, pay-per-call marketing works best for more complex services, often including a high level of commitment from clients. This is because prospective clients usually need more assistance and convincing when deciding on these services.
A few examples include:
- Health: fitness, dental care, weight loss, supplements
- Financial services: debt, tax, mortgage, loans
- Insurance: life insurance, health insurance, auto insurance, homeowners insurance
- Home improvement: contractors (e.g., plumbers, electricians, roofers, landscapers), solar panels, remodeling, appliances
- Legal services: lawyer services, claims
What are the best pay-per-call affiliate networks & programs?
As mentioned earlier, the easiest way to find pay-per-call offers is to apply as a publisher on various affiliate networks or programs. There are many networks you can choose from, but some of the most popular ones are:
If you’ve run affiliate offers before, you probably know all about OfferVault. You can find pay-per-call offers from different affiliate networks, all in one platform.
You can filter based on specific verticals and countries, and find information about the payout of each offer.
2. ClickDealer
ClickDealer has been around for over a decade, which means that thousands of advertisers have placed their offers (including exclusive offers) here.
3. Marketcall
Marketcall specializes in pay-per-call offers, and while they are newer to the market compared to the first two, they have rapidly grown over the years.
You can find offers from various verticals, including all the top verticals we mentioned previously (e.g., home improvement, finance, travel).
Aragon Advertising has been an award-winning pay-per-call network for six consecutive years. They stand out by offering high-quality offers from different verticals, and high payouts per call.
5. Goojibear
Goojibear is a click-to-call network, and its sole focus is pay-per-call marketing. They also offer a large selection of offers to choose from, and they are known to be reliable and quick with payments.
6. PALO
They have been in the inbound pay-per-call industry for almost 15 years now, with their main verticals being healthcare, legal services, insurance, and financial services. Due to these lucrative offers, PALO is known to reward higher payouts.
This California-based network prides itself on delivering “ridiculously high quality leads”. This means that you can find high-quality offers from top verticals, and expect very high commissions per call.
Because they promise such high-quality leads to their advertisers, the vetting process for publishers is also stricter.
8. Lead Smart
Unlike the other affiliate networks we discussed so far, Lead Smart focus on home improvement service offers in the US.
Wisdom is an affiliate network, and their key selling point is that they connect targeted consumers with relevant service providers. They are mainly active in the mortgage, credit, insurance and education verticals.
10. Digital Media Solutions (DMS)
DMS is another provider that connects advertisers with publishers and consumers in real time, providing valuable insights into campaign performance. They pride themselves on high quality traffic and top-notch support.
Regardless of the network you choose in the end, you need to research them beforehand to ensure they are trustworthy and reliable when it comes to payments. Also, newer networks tend to offer faster account approvals, while industry veterans have stricter acceptance criteria.
What are the best paid traffic sources for pay-per-call campaigns?
When it comes to promoting pay-per-call offers, paid traffic has the highest scalability. You can essentially promote these offers on any search, social, or native ad platform, as long as it complies with the platform’s guidelines.
A few of the best ad networks you can buy traffic from are:
- Google Ads
With Google Search campaigns, you have the ability to target users who are actively searching for the product or service you are promoting.
With targeted keywords and location-based settings, you can reach potential customers at the moment of intent, increasing the chances of driving high-quality call conversions.
Google Ads also offers features like call extensions and call-only campaigns. This means you can easily display your advertiser’s phone number within search results, allowing users to directly initiate a call.
2. Meta (Facebook & Instagram)
What makes Facebook & Instagram suitable for your pay-per-call campaigns is their advanced algorithm and targeting options.
With demographic and interest-based targeting, you can reach a highly relevant audience likely to engage with pay-per-call offers.
3. LinkedIn
LinkedIn is especially useful for pay-per-call campaigns within the B2B (business-to-business) sector. LinkedIn’s advanced targeting options (e.g., industry, job title, company size) improve the precision of reaching the right audience.
4. Native Advertising Platforms
Platforms such as Taboola or Outbrain could also be used to promote your pay-per-call campaigns. With their content discovery engines, you can engage users with native-style ad placements seamlessly integrated into the user experience.
How to track your pay-per-call campaigns with accuracy
Once you have found high-quality pay-per-call offers and pinpointed a few ad platforms you will buy traffic from, you also need to figure out how to track and monitor your campaigns.
Tracking will allow you to figure out what is losing you money, and what is working well. Based on this information, you can optimize your campaigns to improve results.
One of the most popular inbound call trackers in the industry is Ringba. They do an amazing job at tracking calls and call-related data. Ringba boasts a massive amount of data – you could spend days analyzing it, and still not get a full picture.
While Ringba excels at call tracking and offers basic conversion reporting back to your chosen traffic sources, its capabilities for analyzing ad performance are limited. A traditional click tracker, like ClickFlare, is still necessary to gain full understanding of your campaign performance.
How to use Ringba and click trackers in combination
As we mentioned before, the ideal tracking solution is to use Ringba and a traditional click tracker alongside each other.
Integrating most click trackers to Ringba is not an easy task. It requires manual configuration, which involves defining the query parameter the Ringba script should catch, and then defining a postback. This process would need to be repeated for each individual campaign.
This process can be simplified if the two platforms are directly integrated via API. Currently, ClickFlare is the only click tracker to have a direct integration with Ringba.
In this scenario, you simply need to connect your ClickFlare account to Ringba through an API token, and the job is done. No postbacks needed. ClickFlare will automatically start to pull conversions and revenue data from Ringba.
How to build pay-per-call landing pages
Another crucial part of succeeding at pay-per-call marketing is being able to create high-converting landing pages quickly.
An easy way to do this is by using a landing page builder, such as LanderLab, that allows you to create landing pages using ready-made templates, without requiring any prior design or coding skills.
The best news is, LanderLab is also integrated with both Ringba and ClickFlare. With this integration, you simply need your Ringba campaign ID, and LanderLab will automatically inject the Ringba script into your landing page.
With the built-in ClickFlare integration, you will be able to track how your landing pages are performing with ease.
Pay-per-call marketing: Conclusion
Pay-per-call marketing is growing, making it a very profitable niche for online marketers.
To get started, you simply need to apply for a few pay-per-call affiliate programs or networks, select offers from top-performing verticals (e.g., health, finance, home improvement), and promote these offers on various ad platforms (e.g., Facebook or Google Ads).
You can use top industry tracking and landing page tools to simplify your workload and improve results. We recommend using Ringba, ClickFlare, and LanderLab in combination to achieve optimal success with your pay-per-call campaigns.
