Pay Per Call Dos and Don’ts: Inside my Most Profitable Campaign

What are the pay-per-call dos and don’ts? Tabish is here to point the way.

Tabish and PPCall are interchangeable. He’s seen and done it all. Having over a decade in experience online, he’s moved his chips into PPCall and gone all in.

Mobile will overtake desktop to become the primary internet advertising medium by the end of 2017, a year earlier than previously forecasted. According to Zenith’s new Advertising Expenditure Forecasts, advertisers across the world will spend US$99.3bn on mobile internet advertising in 2017, compared to US$97.4bn on desktop internet advertising, with projections of close to $200bn by 2019.

Join Tabish as he guides you on how to start with PPCall campaigns and exclusively covers one of his most profitable, and still current, campaigns. If you’re running PPCall or looking for diversifying your tool belt, this will be the presentation for you.

Speech by Tabish Nishat | CEO, Outsourced Solutions

Tabish Nishat Speech Transcript

Alright, how are you doing guys?

What? You’re doing nothing? Come on make some noise! How are you doing?

So just to let me understand my audience better, are there any pay-per-call publishers actually in the hall?

Say yes if you are.

Yeah, wow. I didn’t know I was that unique.

Introduction

Okay, so my name is Tabish Nishat, I am a CEO of Outsourced Solutions. I’ve been an affiliate for over a decade and considered a super affiliate.

I specialised in Google search and pay-per-call campaigns.

I’ve done over a few million dollars on campaigns with advertisers and publishers. I’m also a Google premier partner.

An advertising partner would call me a pioneer in the pay-per-call space.

So this will be our presentation overview. We’ll be covering the following things in our presentation.

We don’t have a lot of time so I’ll try to go through things as quickly as I can.

So we’ll be going through what makes pay-per-call highly profitable? What are the best sources of traffic? How to set up a call only campaign in AdWords?

Example of a profitable pay-per-call campaign, do’s and don’ts.

And at the end of the session, we’ll go through a question and answer. So if you have something, note it down. I’ll be happy to answer you in the end.

Pay-Per-Call Marketing

So what is pay-per-call marketing? For a lot of you, it may be an alien future but I say it’s the future of marketing.

Pay-per-call marketing is a form of performance-based marketing where affiliates are paid by a commission of the calls they drive to a business.

Commissions are based on the total number of calls they drive or the number of calls that meet specific criteria like call duration, the location of the caller, and more.

According to Zenith, mobile advertising is gonna be taking the world by storm. So now is the right time to get in pay-per-call.

I mean I started like six 6 back. It was a really alien future at that time.

But right now is the time to jump in the pay-per-call ship.

Most of the pay-per-call offers will be a consumer based services, like insurance, auto, health, life, home security, addiction, home improvement, financial security, student debt, credit repair, debt settlement, cable, wireless and many more.

So why pay-per-call is the future of affiliate marketing?

Pay-Per-Call Marketing Is The Future Of AM

Profit margin is great for affiliates, networks, advertisers.

So I know a lot of you are CPA, CPI, CPL publishers.

And you make like 10% if you are above average. If you’re great, you make 20%. If you are extraordinary, you make 30%.

But in pay-per-call, we are talking about 50 to 100% actual profit. I’m not talking about revenue, I’m talking about the actual profit over your campaign.

So let’s say if you’re spending $100,000 on ad spend, you are actually getting $100,000 on your net profit as well.

That’s a great profit margin.

Then again, as I told you according to Zenith, in 2017, it was 99.3 billion on mobile internet advertising. It will be close to 200 billion by 2019.

And a major chunk of that market would be pay-per-call.

So once you decide that you want to run a pay-per-call campaign, what to look into it? What sort of campaign do you want to run?

Choosing A Pay-per-call Offer

So there are two types of campaigns in pay-per-call mostly. One is volume campaign and one is high margin campaigns.

So the volume campaign is, let’s say you’re targeting a specific geo or you have like 50 states campaign. And it has a payout of like $20.

Then you have another campaign which may be targeting like 20 states or 25 states and it has a payout of $50.

So in my personal opinion, you want to target the campaign with the larger geo. So because the campaign who have like 50 states rather than comparatively to 20 states, 50 states, one would get you a very, very lower cost per click compared to the higher pair campaign, which is targeting only 20 states.

So whenever you want to target the pay-per-call campaign, that’s what you look for. Look for the higher geo campaign.

How will campaign restrictions affect you all? This is again very important.

There are a few campaigns which are zip restricted. There are few campaigns which are age restricted.

So while selecting your pay-per-call campaigns, you need to be able to see that you are selecting a campaign which is least restricted. There are no zip restriction, they are no age restrictions.

The less the restrictions are, the more your profit is gonna be.

Offers That Are Direct And Exclusive

Look for offers which are direct and exclusive.

Again, when you’re working through networks, you need to ask these questions to the network.

“If your offer is direct? If your offer is exclusive? Or is it brokered through another network?”

Because if it’s brokered through another network, they are already sharing the profit margin. And you don’t want to do that.

At the end of it, you want to make maximum money, as much as possible.

So look for the offers which are directly and exclusively with the networks.

So some people think that pay-per-call really does not have volume or money to be made. These are just random numbers.

Here, you can see we have 592,000 calls with the total commission earned over $1.2 million. So you can see the paid calls are 84,641, just an average number.

Raw Campaigns

So here you can see the name of the campaigns. It’s a cable campaign over there. Then we have addiction campaign, then we have raw addiction campaign.

Raw campaigns, it’s a part of pay-per-call campaigns that what it does basically, it just verifies the intent of the caller and you get paid after 5 to 10 seconds.

Once the caller is on the line you get paid. That’s called raw campaign in pay-per-call.

Then you can see the tax, health insurance, and mental health.

Google Search

So how Google Search works with pay-per-call.

Okay, Google AdWords is still the best source to drive very, very high-quality calls. And a relatively very simple. It’s not really difficult to set up an AdWords campaign.

Again, with Google search, still the very relatively, very high quality, calls will drive to your business. So you need to negotiate your date with the networks because you’re driving the most high-quality calls to your business.

So Google AdWords is still a way to go or at least to start with pay-per-call.

And setting up an AdWords campaign is actually fairly easy. And the best way to target mobile devices.

It’s again, as I told you.

Bonus Tip:

Here is a tip. Google usually hates all sort of affiliates but Google doesn’t hate pay-per-call affiliates, why?

You are not cloaking anything, you have no linked sites. You really don’t need any content.

I mean that’s a great thing.

You don’t really need to invest in your content, on your site, or your website or anything like that.

All you need is a simple landing page. And you are setting up an ad in Google with a simple click to call. And the customer is directly connecting to your call.

So you don’t really need any content.

Alright later, we will review how to set up a click-only campaign.

Zero Risk Strategy

So here is another interesting thing. You can actually try, as many pay-per-call campaigns, as you want.

Google actually gives you free Ad spend voucher for every new account. It depends from country to country, but it’s between $50 – $100.

And I say $100 is a very good amount to test any pay-per-call campaign. You can at least test the water, how it is going for you.

My suggestion is, always start with Manage Clients Centre. You create a Managed Client Centre. And then you create multiple accounts under Managed Client Centres.

So that way, let’s say, your one account goes down with Google, you never know how things go with Google. Let’s say if your one account goes down, you at least have other accounts running.

So you don’t want to run all your campaigns in one account. It’s a recipe for disaster.

Don’t ever do that, don’t ever run all your accounts under one campaign.

You can try as many campaigns as you like without losing a single dollar, of course. Because you can make as many accounts as you want under MCC as a new customer.

So once you find an industry, once you find an industry you like and you know okay, “This is where I can work more in”, then you invest your time, your money.

And then see how it goes from there.

Set Up Pay-per-call Campaign On Google AdWords

So now, we’ll go through how we set up a pay-per-call campaign on Google AdWords.

This is a simple Google interface.

We go to campaigns, that’s after you’ve set up an account. And then, we select “Search Network Only.”

So after we select Search Network Only, there are a few options to set up a campaign. And you see, you’ll select Call Only option over here.

You set up the campaign name, whatever you like. It’s just for your internal reference. Not really anything to do with the actual performance.

You can actually set up the settings. Load the settings from your previous campaign.

But I would advise, to start fresh, every time.

Okay, this is again fairly important, never include search partners in your call-only campaigns. The search partners on Google is still not 100% compatible to make calls every time.

So you need to exclude search partner every time you make a pay-per-call campaign.

Then you select your country, whatever you want to target.

Devices are already as we select call only, so it’s only showing on mobile devices.

Another very important thing and this applies to every AdWords campaign you’re running, always select people in the targeted location.

People actually miss this point so much and are losing so much money because they are getting the clicks from the areas they are not actually targeting.

Then you select your language, whatever language you want to. If it’s English or if it’s multilingual, you can select all the languages over there.

Bid Strategy

Alright, and then we have a bid strategy.

I would advise always to start with manual CPC because you’ll be able to control more your budgets, and maybe 50 or maybe 100 as a starting budget.

Once you set up your budgets and you know you’re doing good, then you advanced to a larger budget, then select the accelerated option.

Here you can select your timing, whatever timing you want to run the campaigns.

And then you have your time zone, written over here. And save and continue.

So the next section, we have our ad group section.

Okay, I think there’s something wrong with the video. Can you check? I guess something went wrong with the video.

Ad Group

But anyhow, in the next slide, you would have seen the ad group.

How to make an ad group?

It’s fairly simple to make an ad. When you’re making an ad group, you just go to the ad group, select the ad.

Try to use the small phrase keywords when you’re doing your ads. And you use the call-to-action keywords like “Call Now”, “Call Toll-Free” because you’re giving a customer an option to connect.

And he knows he has nothing to lose. He’s just calling and he’s just connecting.

So you saying “Call Toll-Free. So he knows it’s not gonna charge me anything.

The Most Hyped Campaign

The most hyped campaign for pay-per-call is open enrolment health insurance.

So every year, open enrolment for individual health insurance coverage begins November 1 and ends January 31.

If anyone’s on Obamacare coverage which is a health insurance plan in the US, they tend to sign up for a plan by December 15.

There’s a huge amount of call traffic as most people line up to get a change in their health insurance plan.

Buyers are more flexible. They have more call centre agents in, they can take more calls.

The payouts are better in the period. So this is the best time to start your pay-per-call campaigns.

The traffic surge is phenomenal. I mean, if I’m generating like 50,000 calls in 6 months and only in these 3 months I would be able to generate 500,000 calls.

It’s that big.

Health Insurance Campaign

So here are a few numbers from current year for our health insurance campaign. You can see on the first 146,000 calls with 234,000 revenue.

Then we have medical, it’s also a health insurance campaign. We have 46,000 calls then we have 191,000 total earned.

And then we have Addiction, Cable, again another auto insurance and again health insurance, 45,000 revenue, 32,000 calls in the last you can see 26,000 calls and 27,000 revenue.

So why are there so many health campaigns over here?

It’s because you really don’t want to run all your traffic with one offer or one network. You need to spread it out.

Let’s say, I mean, one offer is working good with one advertiser. And the second offer is working good with another advertiser.

You need to spread out your campaigns.

Maybe you have like 8 traffic stream and it’s going to advertiser A/B/C/D, so you’ve gotta split-test with different advertisers.

Maybe it’s working great with advertiser A with a 25% conversion rate. And maybe it’s getting really bad with advertiser D with 10% conversion rate.

So you need to really test out different campaigns and you need to check it out, which one is working best for you.

Alright then, these are the last year numbers. If you can see we have 152,000 calls. We earned over $727,000.

Then we have another health running 46,000 calls, then $234,000 in revenue.

Then we have another Medicare 47,990 calls, $190,000 in revenue. We have another health campaign that is 38,000 calls.

So just these health insurance, open enrolment health insurance campaign, in 4 to 5 months can yield you over $1.2 – $1.3 million of revenue.

How To Determine If You’re Doing It Wrong

And as I said, the profit margins are at least 50%. If you’re not getting 50% on your pay-per-call campaigns, you’re doing it absolutely wrong.

But if you are doing it good, 100% is no problem. We have even 120, 130%.

These are the numbers from Google AdWords.

Here you can see 406,000 clicks which equal to calls. And we have phone impressions, and then we have a total cost of $701,000.

And we have another campaign, it’s the same health campaign. This is just to make a comparison and give you a very important tip.

14,000 clicks and $13 in total but there’s a very, very important thing over there. And this number is PTR.

Phone Through Rate (PTR)

Just like you have impressions to click ratio in CTR, in pay-per-call campaigns, you have PTR, like phone to click ratio.

So if you’re phone to click ratio, if you can see in my first campaign, it’s 1.73, I got charged 1.73 and in every CPC.

But when I have a PTR ratio of 6.48, I’m being charged 0.96.

So that’s like almost a half difference between the average cost-per-click I am paying to Google.

The more your PTR is higher, the less your cost would be.

Essentials For The Campaign

So once you decide you’re running it, what are the essentials for the campaign?

So you target people who have higher income bracket. These calls get paid better by the advertiser.

Let’s say the IVR asks, “Hey, are you making like over 100,000 a year, press 1. If you’re making less than 100,000 a year, press 2.

So press 1 getting paid at $20, press 2 get paid at $12.

I want to get paid for $20. So you target people with a high-income bracket.

It’s not very high. 100,000 a year.

Avoid bidding government plans, no advertiser really wants it. Keep keywords short.

Again, this is very important, in pay-per-call, you want to keep keywords for 2 keywords, maximum 3 keywords.

The long tail keyword concept does not really work in pay-per-call. So you don’t really go there. I mean we all use our mobile and we always try to search things with 2 keywords or maximum 3 keywords.

So the long tail keyword concept won’t apply here.

Alright, misspelling keywords have very cheap CPC.

This applies to all AdWords campaigns, not just pay-per-call. It applies to every and each AdWords campaign.

If let’s say I have a keyword of cheap health insurance, and I just swap E with A, it’s a misspelling.

But the CPC of the actual keyword was $5. And when I misspelled it, it becomes $1 so I’m still getting the same traffic. My target traffic is still the same. So try that.

Traffic Sources

What other traffic sources can be useful for pay-per-call?

Alright, any traffic source like Facebook, Bing, PPV etc. I mean, all you need is a specific traffic source, which can target mobile. That’s all.

That’s another thing you can do, you guys run your CPI or CPA, CPL campaigns and you are doing good in it.

So what you can do, there’s always a thank you page at the end of the day. Let’s say you are running an air tickling campaign.

And after running the campaign, you get a web submit-lead. And there’s a Thank You page. You just add the number in the end.

“Hey, do you want to talk to talk to the agent?”

We all want to get connected directly to somebody who we could talk to. They are submitting a lead, they would be doing it for 4 or 5 other pages as well.

So you just need to add a number on your Thank You page. And that would increase your ROI dramatically.

Try it.

This applies to every campaign which you can do.

How To Be Successful At Pay-per-call

So how to be successful at pay-per-call, research is the key.

Get high conversion keywords, negative out low-performing keywords, shop and try different offers, they all work differently.

Let’s say you have a health campaign, you try with different networks, different offers, they all work differently.

Customise your offers.

Google gives you the option to customise your offer. Like hourly bids, location-based bids etc,

Set up tracking on the keyword level. That’s again, very easy with Google Adwords. It’s already integrated.

All you need to do is to turn on call tracking and it does all the job for you.

Don’t be afraid of losing budget. Yeah. I mean, that’s very important.

We really need to invest some money into it to get something out of it. So once your free ad voucher is depleted and you like the campaign, just try it out.

I mean maybe you lose $200-$300 but once you are on break even, you can take it from there. And then you can make a profit out of it.

Pay-Per-Call Dos And Don’ts

Alright, be honest with your affiliate manager.

We really don’t want to do that, but let me tell you like 5 years back, I actually make my $500,000 profit because of the tip of my affiliate manager.

He sent me an email, “Hey why don’t you try these couple keywords out?” And I did and I made $500,000 out of it.

So I always say be honest with your affiliate manager. At least, I am always.

I always tell them, “Okay this is what I’m gonna do, tell me how do you like it?”

At most they will say “no” and you will do it anyways.

So analyse calls, learn, profit and repeat. It’s a simple formula but it’s in pretty much every campaign you’re running in everywhere.

Okay, people think that you can really set and forget pay-per-call campaign, it doesn’t really apply that.

I mean you have to be continuously on the model. I mean everybody is trying to do that.

I personally check my campaigns every 30 minutes, every 40 minutes, every 50 minutes. What’s going on, what keywords I can optimise, what more I can do about it.

Experiment with different IVRs

So every time there is a customer that connects to the pay-per-call campaign, he will hear a greeting IVR. It will say, “Hey, do you want to do this, do you want to do that, press 1 for this, press 2 for that.”

If the IVR is too complex, you will lose the customer right there. So you may just want to change the wording to some generic, some normal, some good wording.

And you may have completely different results.

This is again very important, this does apply to every campaign you’re running on Google AdWords, the Quality score can make or break your campaign.

If you have a quality score of 8 to 10 on some keyword, and you have a quality score of, let’s say 3 or 4 on some keywords. So it’s basically like that.

I mean on 8 to 10 quality score keyword, I am paying Google $2. And if it’s like 3 to 4 quality score keyword, I am paying like maybe $5 or $6 for the same keyword.

So you really need to increase your quality score on your keywords.

If you have any questions, you can ask now or I’ll be available at the after-party and you can ask me over there.

Thank you very much.