Bronte Media

Yahoo has begun launching pay-per-call advertising across its UK properties. First up are Cars and Kelkoo, its European shopping comparison engine. The rates are to be fixed initially but it will be only a matter of time before they are dynamically priced.

This is huge news. Even though AOL has added Ingenio’s pay-per-call listings to its search results and even though it displays them at the very top, there is only one listing and AOL is very much in the second tier. Pay-per-call will really only matter if Yahoo or Google adopts it. As both have displayed a voracious appetite for keeping up with each other, Google adding it will only be a matter of time.

Cars are a great first choice. Pay-per-call more accurately measures the response of classifieds advertising. Although the industry is growing very strongly, the current fixed listing pricing model does not accurately articulate the value of advertising and puts an artificial burden on growth. For instance, Autotrader, which uses call tracking (basically the same technology but only for measurement of response not the pricing of advertising), sees 80-90% of response go through the phone numbers as opposed to online contact.

I can’t wait for Yahoo to launch the advertising in the US and then roll out an ad network to help small publishers (that’s me) monetize inventory via pay-per-call rather than the less-relevant pay-per-click pricing for service-based advertisers.