Comments on: Pay-per-call vs. click-to-call

By: vet mcgriddle

vet mcgriddle — Thu, 01 Dec 2005 12:15:37 +0000

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.

By: James J.

James J. — Thu, 01 Dec 2005 04:16:06 +0000

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.

By: markus

markus — Thu, 01 Dec 2005 02:58:37 +0000

Google adsense will have them in december, so my site will as well.

By: Bill Broadbent

Bill Broadbent — Wed, 30 Nov 2005 21:24:17 +0000

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.