Henry Blodget writes about Ingenio, the pay-per-call company that used to power Match.com’s Profile Helper service (Ingenio used to be Keen.com). Evidently, Match got the short end of the deal with Ingenio, and canceled the service after a year or so due to lack of interest. Some blame the short lifespan of the profile service on technical glitches, something about the modules on your Match home page loading in the browser by default in the closed position, so you couldn’t see the ads and offers without clicking a link.
Pay-per-call and click-to-call are hot topics in the online advertising space at the moment. Bloget does a good job describing the differences between Ingenio’s service and Google’s new click-to-call offering. Pundits are pitting Google vs. Ingenio, and Bloget thinks Ingenio is a acquisition target for Microsoft or Yahoo.
I remember when AT&T offered click-to-call services for websites in 1997, what’s old is new again. Disruptive technologies like VOIP will do that.
The average price-per-call across the Ingenio network is now $10-$11 per call. In some categories, prices-per-call are as much as $60.
Click-to-call makes sense for dating sites, from a customer acquisition and customer service. I have never once seen an “Operators are standing by” mention on a dating site. Offering a live or even a pre-recorded sales pitch as a link in your affiliate marketing materials and pay-to-click ads might be just what it takes to get customers to take out their wallets on your sites instead of the competition’s.
I haven’t seen any sites that make use of this technology yet, although I suspect some are testing it out quietly.
As a dating site executive, where will you spend your money in 2006? On offering new communication features for members in the hopes that this will differentiate you from your competitors or implement technology-based customer acquisition and retention systems?
Or, simply raise your marketing spend and hope for the best?
[tags: clicktocall, paytocall, ingenio]
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I don’t think the onlines could make that metric work Dave, though it might work for offline services. We tested Ingenio a while back and the volumes were very small. A lot of short calls too that amounted to nothing. We loved it in theory, but volume was virtually non-existant. From an online perspective, I see these numbers:
If the average call cost is $10 and you have a ballpark labor cost of $4 per call (20 minutes with $12 total hourly comp) and say a 20% optimistic closing ratio (from call to paying customer) you’re looking at an acquisition cost of $70 per customer. Maybe that would work for the eHarmony’s and Perfect Match, but not the common personals site running their current models.
Just my opinion.
Google adsense will have them in december, so my site will as well.
It doesn’t look like the problem with the comments has been fixed. The front page says this post has two comments, but when you click to view them it says there are zero.
I went through the Ingenio/Match experiment. I don’t blame Match for closing the books on it. Ingenio had more tech problems than you can count. Everytihng from 4-10 hour down times, to dropped calls. Not to mention that the fact the service included 30 minute free consultations, it made it hard as heck to convert a sale when people just wanted some free advice.
Whatever tech problems may have happened on the match side of things, the problems on the ingenio side made things a little less productive then a ted kennedy/ Ann Coulter hug-a-thon.