Why All Media Buyers Need to Add Pay Per Call in 2023

by Todd Stearn, CEO

Originally posted January 5, 2021

Affiliate marketing is all about creating the most enticing offers to endorse a product or service and utilize the most valuable traffic sources to convert new, high-quality audiences into leads. As with many aspects of business, it’s important to continue growing and expanding your revenue streams, and if you aren’t taking advantage of Pay Per Call campaigns, you’re missing out.

These days, affiliate marketing is centered more toward one-on-one engagement, which is where Pay Per Call campaigns come into their own. Although Pay Per Call campaigns have shown successful results for many years, it is still a relatively new affiliate marketing method, and therefore comes with untapped potential. Any media buyer starting 2021 looking for ways to diversify their revenue stream needs to take a hard look at how Pay Per Call can help them achieve new heights with their business.

How Does Pay Per Call Work?

Pay Per Call is a performance-based marketing strategy that enables advertisers to provide affiliates and publishers with a unique phone number, allowing them to track the generation of leads and sales, much like with a URL. The main difference being that there is a more personal connection with a person-to-person phone call, and thus, higher value is placed on a call than a web lead.

Advertisers buying calls use call centers to field inbound calls or outbound dial web leads. Once they get a lead prospect on the phone the call center staff can go on to make a sale. Affiliate media buyers who drive call traffic are compensated depending on the number of calls made, the number of callers that complete the transaction, or the length of time of each call.

With Pay Per Call, a media buyer will typically build a landing page with a unique phone number as the call to action. This landing page should engage your audience with content surrounding the value of the product or service you are promoting. (We find review and comparison content works quite well to help generate an inbound call.)

Another way to convince your audience to pick up the phone and call is to ask them some questions and collect some info about them before presenting them with the “call now” CTA.

A Pay Per Call campaign will, 99% of the time, offer a higher payout than a lead campaign. This is due to the high-intent of a lead who picks up the phone then and there, combined with the person-to-person connection with a sales agent required to close a deal.

Why You Need Pay Per Call in Your Campaign Mix

Reason 1: Diversity

Any experienced media buyer will be able to recall that time their big campaign went down for good. Many will recall several times they saw their income evaporate because of changes to business models or regulations. Well, that is why Pay Per Call presents an opportunity. Call campaigns have a long average lifetime due to the high-quality interactions it creates between a user and an advertiser, in leading industries such as Medicare, auto insurance, and pest control. Plus, any additional diversity you can add to your campaign mix is a welcome hedge against the inevitable shifting sands of affiliate marketing.

Reason 2: First-Party Data

Any media buyer familiar with lookalike audiences should realize the value that comes by uploading phone numbers of converted callers to a Facebook or Google audience. We’re in the final days of the browser cookie and with iOS 14 coming around the corner to put a big dent in mobile attribution, prescient marketers know that first-party data will make a huge difference to their success in the future. Using a tracking platform to capture caller IDs on your call campaigns will lead you to enhancing your targeting capabilities for any campaign you may want to run on these platforms in the future.

Reason 3: Pay Per Call Works on Any Traffic Source

One of the advantages of Pay Per Call is that you can drive calls through any traffic source. If your media buying expertise is native, email, or mobile, then you can apply that specialization to Pay Per Call marketing without having to learn an entirely new traffic source. As long as you’re willing to tinker with a landing page to find the right creative touch, Pay Per Call works everywhere.

Best Traffic Sources for Inbound Call Generation

Search

The high purchase intent of people searching on Google always contributes to quality conversions and, depending on search term volume of the offer you’re promoting, high volume as well. Google’s Call Only and Call Extension ad formats are designed for driving phone calls, and if used properly, are very cost-effective.

Social

Facebook, Instagram, Snap, TikTok, and Pinterest all provide quality click to call traffic on mobile targeted campaigns. Due to their high level of audience segmentation and the ability to engage a user with messaging designed to drive awareness, social channels are great at leading users down a path to conversion. Social platforms often require marketers to spend time developing strong creative or copy that engages and convinces a person to convert, while balancing “clickbaity” ads that could get your ads or accounts disapproved. Striking this balance leads to high volume and low cost calls for your campaign.

Growing Your Business Using Pay Per Call Campaigns

Pay Per Call is no longer an area you can afford to ignore. Making the most out of Pay Per Call campaigns will provide you with a wider range of options for making money through affiliate marketing, and diversity is one of the key strengths of media buyers who have scaled their operations to seven and even eight figures annually.

At Aragon, we’ve been guiding media buyers into Pay Per Call marketing since 2014. With over 20 verticals and relationships with top brands in insurance, finance, home services, and more, Aragon is the experienced and reputable network you can trust to grow your business using Pay Per Call.

To get started with Pay Per Call today, join our network.

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