What is Pay Per Call?

Pay per call is an advertising, billing and performance marketing model that allows businesses to connect with inbound customer phone calls.

Similar to other lead generation methods, pay per call, or PPCall, is a simple way for advertisers or affiliates to buy and connect to qualified calls from real customers.

Businesses around the world are actively looking to connect with qualified prospects over the phone and they are willing to pay a high price for those calls.

The pay per call business model brings an immense amount of value to these businesses by bridging that gap.

Using pay per call as a lead gen and consumer acquisition strategy, these businesses can buy inbound calls from potential customers on a per call basis.

Essentially, pay per call means that a business is paying to receive an inbound phone call from a prospective customer.

You are directly connecting businesses with the customers they need – actual humans who are seeking an immediate solution to a problem they are facing that very moment.

That’s what makes the pay per call industry so full of profitable opportunities.

Although there are similarities to other types of online marketing, many of the tactics and strategies used in pay per call marketing to generate calls can differ:

You will need to think more creatively
Plan on putting in more legwork
Be prepared to use non-traditional traffic sources and marketing techniques to drive inbound calls that convert

How Pay Per Call Works

With pay per call marketing, a buyer pays you on a per call basis to be connected to a caller.

Generally speaking, pay per call involves three distinctive parties: the caller, the buyer and you.

In the case of performance marketing, this can get more complicated; with multiple stakeholders, platforms, networks and others involved. But generally speaking, pay per call involves those three parties: the caller, the buyer and you.

Here’s an example of what a simple call flow looks like:

You place an ad online with your call tracking number – This can be done using Google Ads and other paid traffic sources
The caller sees your ad and calls the displayed tracking number – A call to action in your ad copy compels a prospective customer to call the phone number featured in your online ad
You route the call to the buyer – Call flow management becomes very simple through the use of call routing and tracking software such as Ringba
The buyer receives the call and pays you for it – Through the use of your tracking number, the call is attributed to you and the buyer pays for it
You track and report on the call – Using the powerful tracking and analytics capabilities found in Ringba, you are able to provide your clients with a complete overview of the calls that you’ve generated

Why Pay Per Call Marketing?

Simply put, everyone has a phone.

The number of people who have a smartphone in their pocket is higher than ever before – and that number is on track to grow each and every year.

In the US alone, 81% of the population already owns a smartphone and as of 2020 there are over 6.3 billion mobile broadband subscriptions worldwide.

That’s an enormous number of potential calls to generate.

Pay per call campaigns are inherently geared towards high intent prospects, giving pay per call leads a significantly improved conversion rate and marketing ROI over traditional online marketing.

When a business takes advantage of pay per call marketing, they are giving high intent, prospective customers a greater opportunity to instantly connect with the brand and talk to real humans.

How to Promote Pay Per Call Offers or Find Call Buyers

So how exactly does an affiliate begin to find pay per call offers to promote, or someone to sell calls to?

Let's go over some potential options.

Pay Per Call Offers

Here are a few resources available to help fast track affiliates who want to get their feet wet with inbound call generation and start promoting offers:

PayPerCallNetworks.com

PayPerCallNetworks.com features a growing directory of the top pay per call networks.

Compiled by Ringba and bolstered by our strong relationships with all of the networks listed, PayPerCallNetworks.com helps you fast track your application and engagement with industry leading networks.

OfferVault’s Pay Per Call Offers

Through OfferVault’s pay per call offers page publishers can search and sort through the latest and greatest pay per call offers across a wide range of verticals.

This can also be an excellent resource for PPCall beginners, because OfferVault allows them to preview offer inventory before joining a network.

Call Buyers

You are going to need someone to buy your calls.

Without a buyer to send your traffic and pay for those inbound calls you generate; you don’t have a pay per call business.

Creating a Call Buyer Network

A lot of pay per call businesses rely on self-service, managed networks of small buyers.

These buyers can range from a single dentist, insurance, or real estate office, to dozens or even hundreds of offices involved in many different industries.

Call routing and tracking software greatly simplifies the process of scaling from one to hundreds of call buyers in a network.

This allows an aspiring pay per call business owner to focus on business development and finding new clients, rather than building a tech stack from scratch.

Ringba’s Pay Per Call Masterclass features an excellent lesson on creating a call buyer network that can be viewed below or on YouTube.

Pay Per Call Traffic Sources

Buying targeted traffic is required to generate inbound calls for your clients.

Here are some of the best paid traffic sources for generating calls:

Search Traffic

Using search traffic and keyword-based targeting, you can identify customers with high buyer-intent.

Because customers using search engines are actively looking for a solution to their current problem, search traffic is the highest quality type of traffic you can target for your pay per call campaigns

Search traffic sources include ad platforms like Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising.

Social Traffic

With social traffic and audience-based targeting, you can find different buyer-types and customer profiles.

Social traffic is passive, this means that the people who are using social media are not necessarily ready to take action, find a solution or purchase a product.

Social traffic sources include ad platforms like Facebook Ads and Twitter Ads.

PPV Traffic

With PPV traffic and domain-based targeting, you can find customers based on their buyer-history.

These types of ads are usually the lowest-quality type of traffic you can buy for pay per call because they are interruptive to the user’s browsing experience.

PPV traffic sources include ad networks like Adsterra, Adcash, Propel Media and RTX Platform.

All three of these paid traffic types give you extremely specific targeting options.

That means they each provide you with the opportunity to find the exact callers you’re looking for, at the exact moment they are looking for a solution and getting them to click-to-call.

Creative Assets and Landing Pages for Pay Per Call

Additionally, you are going to need creative assets as well as domains and hosting for your landing pages.

This may not be news to those who are already familiar with online marketing, but it’s worth mentioning for the beginners out there.

All of these are critical to the success of any online business, especially a pay per call business:

Domain name(s)
Web hosting
Banners, logos and other branded media
Landing pages

The Pay Per Call Community

For those looking to network with the pay per call community, there are many online communities and discussion groups out there.

Ringba is passionate about growing our industry and in order to better facilitate that growth we’ve developed a number of communities for beginners and industry-insiders.

Feel free to join in on the conversation in any of our online communities:

- Pay Per Callers Forum

- LinkedIn Group: Ringba’s Pay Per Call and Lead Generation

- Facebook Group: Pay Per Call

- Plus many more!

Learn More About Pay Per Call

Anyone interested in learning more about pay per call should enroll in Ringba’s Pay Per Call Masterclass.

Pay Per Call Masterclass

Ringba’s free Pay Per Call Masterclass starts from the absolute beginning, assuming you have no prior experience in performance marketing or pay per call.

By the end of this course, you will have a better understanding of performance marketing than a college graduate with a marketing degree.

Spanning over 20 hours and 22 separate lessons, you will learn everything about pay per call from Ringba’s founder himself, Adam Young.

The PPCall Masterclass is broken down into 5 course modules, containing a total of 22 individual lessons:

Introduction to Pay Per Call
Getting Started with Pay Per Call
Pay Per Call Copywriting and Advertising
Starting Your Pay Per Call Business
Scaling Your Pay Per Call Business

Pay Per Callers Show

For those that can’t get enough, the Pay Per Callers Show podcast is another incredible learning resource for both beginners and veterans.

Each episode is packed with PPCall knowledge and features expert insights from leading industry figures.

Here's some of our favorite episodes:

Why Choose Ringba for Call Tracking?

Call tracking software is the number one requirement for successfully promoting pay per call campaigns or working with inbound calls.

Seriously. It’s the most important piece of the puzzle.

Ringba provides you with everything you need to set up, track, manage and optimize your call marketing campaigns so you can generate higher-quality calls and more conversions for your buyers.

Using Ringba allows you to:

Get Tracking Numbers - Get local and toll-free numbers for tracking data and routing calls.
Route Calls to Targets - Create dynamic routing plans for your campaigns for forwarding calls to the best destination.
Manage Call Campaigns - Track, manage and optimize all your call marketing campaigns from a single platform.
Create Custom IVRs - Build custom IVR trees for qualifying callers and routing them to Targets.
Attribute Traffic Sources - Optimize your campaigns by finding your highest converting traffic sources.
Analyze Reports - View detailed call analytics, export reports and work with data in real-time.

Sign up for a Ringba demo and start tracking your inbound calls today!