Improved Customer Service will Drive Mobile Local Search

Over at Screenwerk Greg Sterling just asked “Will Local Market Ultimately Reject PFP/PPC”

Calls are a difficult deliverable for many SMBs. As Greg previously wrote when FastCall411 launched, consumers expect immediate availability when hiring a local merchant.

Problem is merchants don’t always answer their phones or are not available and don’t want to be billed for leads they can not fulfill. In this case not only is the call not billable when the plumber “is under the sink” and not available when the consumer needs them, but the consumer has not been able to make a decision in hiring a plumber.

Until we can better match consumer demand with merchant supply – PPCall pricing will be discounted and margins for calls will be lower than clicks.

We must look beyond call tracking as merely a means to prove ROI. Voice applications can help improve the consumer experience by matching ready to buy consumers dynamically with ready to sell merchants. For PPCall to work, the focus must be on merchants who best serve their consumers, rather than the highest bid for calls.

For example, knowing a consumer is looking for a 2001 Honda Civic (based on the call), TryAnother - our call routing application - offers a redirection to a 2nd seller if the first car is sold, or if the caller wants to keep shopping after the first call. The consumer can also review the interaction with the seller right from within the call. These types of voice applications will help fix PPCall leakage, SMB churn and, in my opinion, will drive mobile local search.

So I respectfully I disagree with Greg’s statement regarding PPCall:

But there’s another (radical) performance scenario in the mix too: YP publishers simply selling calls derived from whatever source (print, online, mobile). This product is being tested right now in certain markets. That makes the traffic sources more of a black box and the publisher manages the delivery of leads or calls from any/all of them. It also means that under certain circumstances “organic” calls can potentially be counted as well (ethical caveats here). This has the advantage of no required education and no analytics to understand, pay attention to or optimize against.

I believe there is significant opportunity for innovation in analyzing the interaction between calling consumers and merchants. As I written here before, I also suspect that Google with the relaunch of Google Voice, and Skype are headed in this direction.

Yellow Pages: How to Increase Leads 1000%

Telmetrics released very interesting results of a *tracking URL* study they conducted from November 2008 to April 2009 with 1200 print Yellow Pages ads. Telmetrics is a long time vendor in the call measurement space. Though several entrants crowded the call tracking market a few years ago - namely VoiceStar, eStara, Ingenio, CallSource, StandardCall and others – Telmetrics has remained independent and reemerged as the leader in the space. I commend the innovation in offering Yellow Page publishers another tool to prove ROI to their local advertisers.

The Telmetrics press release states "Tracking unique URL activity and call measurement reflects a 78 percent increase in leads driven by print Yellow Pages."

I asked Bill Dinan, the new CEO, if leads delivered to the advertiser increased 78% or just the total tracked leads vs tracked calls alone. I assume the leads were previously delivered, just not tracked with a unique URL. The difference is semantic, however. A lead not tracked is basically a lead not delivered in the eyes of the advertiser.

It’s interesting to think about lead quality in this scenario. Is a phone lead 10 or 15 seconds? What constitutes a web lead in a URL tracking study? Do the analytics eliminate referral (search) traffic and only report leads resulting from the print ads? Is a unique web user a lead (impressions)? Or is a web result a lead (email, call, printed coupon)? Without these definitions its hard to make a "call vs web lead" analysis apples to apples.

The Yellow Pages industry needs to fix their leaking bucket, but I am not sure URL tracking is scalable. It’s an interesting offer for a few existing advertisers, and can be used to extrapolate estimates of online leads referred by the print ads. Offering existing call tracking advertisers URL tracking provides deeper reporting to a smaller group of advertisers. Alternatively, and far more effective in my opinion, Yellow Pages publishers, such as AT&T, RHD and Idearc could provide lead reporting to far more advertisers.

If and when the Yellow Pages industry gets serious about saving itself, they will need to prove ROI to many more advertisers. Call tracking usage will have to increase at a multiple of 10X (at a minimum) and either the vendors (such as Telmetrics) or the publishers themselves will need to innovate to insure that quality leads are delivered to merchants and that consumer benefit increases.

Call tracking and voice applications can improve the consumer experience and better match the consumer demand with merchant supply. Publishers will need to embrace voice applications to realize the many benefits of integrating this technology into mobile local search.

If a publisher were increase call tracking usage 10X, they could report that lead delivery increased nearly 1000%.

That’s a headline.