It’s no secret that advertising budgets are shrinking, and the pressure is intensifying for marketers to find cost-effective ways to drive leads for their companies. Many marketers are finding that performance-based advertising is a great way to ensure advertising dollars are spent only when consumers take action on their ads, resulting in a more-effective ROI. One form of performance-based advertising that is receiving quite a bit of hype recently is pay-per-call advertising.

Pay-per-call advertising provides an easy way to track phone calls and subsequent conversions or sales, which makes assessing a campaign’s effectiveness and value quite easy for advertisers. This is exactly why pay-per-call advertising is becoming increasingly popular, particularly among local business advertisers.

Pay-per-call advertising can come in many forms, making it a great fit for a variety of businesses. For us at TMPDM/15miles, pay-per-call programs can be applied to online media like Internet Yellow Pages and mobile advertising, as well as offline media like print Yellow Pages and free directory assistance. The increased interest from advertisers and agencies for these types of campaigns will, no doubt, inspire more online and offline publishers to offer pay-per-call programs, in addition to their subscription-based or pay-per-click-based programs. According to Telmetrics, the number of local pay-per-call campaigns that were tracked tripled in the first half of 2009, and this number is expected to gain even more momentum in 2010, as advertisers and publishers hop on the bandwagon.

Of course not all advertisers will benefit from a pay-per-call campaign.  Businesses that can benefit the most from this type of program are those with the ability to convert a phone call into a quality lead or sale.  Examples of this would be a restaurant that takes phone orders, an insurance agent, or a florist.  Businesses that rely on in-store or e-commerce sales are not the best fit for pay-per-call.

In general, I think advertisers and agencies are hungry for advertising that can prove its worth. That is why I am hoping 2010 will bring us a smorgasbord of new, performance-based advertising options to feast on.