Yahoo Local IS Running Pay Per Call
We reported yesterday that Yahoo may be testing Ingenio Pay Per Call ads in their Yahoo Local Search offering. Greg Sterling, Search Engine Journal contributor and Managing Editor/Program Director of the Kelsey Group, received a phone call last night which more or less confirms the Yahoo PPCall tests. The call was from a reported who spilled the beans after speaking with Yahoo (well, maybe it is double hearsay):
I received a call from a Bloomberg reporter tonight (cellphone reception in an elevator no less) who said that Yahoo! had acknowledged to him that the company was in fact doing a test of PPCall with Ingenio’s product (kind of double hearsay).
We went through all the usual stuff about the value proposition of PPCall and the contrast with PPClick. Anyway, I told him that this would give the medium an additional boost of legitimacy and open it up to a wider base of advertisers almost immediately (depending on whether/when Yahoo! adopts and rolls out).
Pay Per Call on Yahoo would be the “cover of a Rolling Stone” for the budding search to phone industry. Verizon, Amazon, Miva, AOL and other are currently running similar programs from such companies as Ingenio, Estara and Thinking Voice.
