Pay-per-Call Works a Little ServiceMagic
The people ServiceMagic serves are busy folks: carpenters, contractors, landscapers, plumbers, dry wallers, house cleaners and other home-improvement professionals who want to reach homeowners in their service areas.
To do that, ServiceMagic has called on the marketing help of Jingle Networks, the company that operates the Free411 mobile directory service. In return for free lookups by dialing 1-800-FREE-411, mobile users listen to ads.
Those ads can be of two types. The first, a simple sponsorship ad, plays while they’re being connected to the automated voice-recognition directory system. The second spot runs when users have identified the business or category they’re looking up, and it’s most often a pay-per-call ad. If Jingle has an advertiser relevant to the user’s search, it’ll serve that ad and offer to connect the user to that advertiser with the press of a button. The advertiser only pays if a customer chooses that option, clicks through and completes the call.
That mobile directory business has kept the year-old Jingle Networks as busy as ServiceMagic’s customers. The company now reportedly handles 3% of the total U.S. market for directory calls
