The Danger of Pay Per Call

April 25, 2005 -- Pay-per-clicks generated $2.6 billion revenue in the USA in 2004, according to Jupiter Research. Pay-per-click is an advertising pricing model in which advertisers pay search engines such as Google or Yahoo based on how many consumers clicked on a promotion.

But Internet advertisers begin to realize that the online market is starting to saturate. Therefore they are branching out into the off-line world in search for new revenue streams.

65% of small businesses are not online yet, according to Colizer Inc. a small but fast growing Internet marketing company in San Diego. Colizer is offering Internet marketing solutions for small business without access to the Internet.

Now AOL announced that it is adding pay-per-call to its revenue model. Pay-per-call ads appear at the top of sponsored links in AOL Search results, and display a toll-free number in the search result. Clicking on the ad directs the searcher to an information page with a description and additional details about the advertiser, rather than to a landing page on the advertiser's web site.

Colizer’s CEO Christian Kameir explains: ‘The danger of pay-per-click or pay-per-call is that it can be miss-used by individuals who want to harm their competition. If I wanted to deplete my competitors pre-paid account with one of the search engines I simply spend half an hour repeatedly clicking his link. The same could happen with pay-per-call where someone can just repeatedly call the 800-number and hang up or worse program a dialer to do the same.

Colizer developed a solution for small businesses to close the gap between the consumers who wants to send an email to small business by forwarding these to the owner’s cell phone as SMS. We call it Clients by SMS or short ‘CbS’, says Colizer’s VP of Marketing Sean Roach. Colizer offers his service for a flat fee of $7.99 and the business is even provided with their own top level domain and website which is also submitted to all the mayor search engines.