A Lesson Learned in Mobile Marketing

—This post was originally removed as we worked on some things with an advertiser. It is now being re-posted for your learning pleasure. —
Over the past couple week I have had some opportunity to work closely with EliteClicksMedia.com. ECM provided me with a Pay-Per-Call offer that paid out $10 per phone call no matter the length. So… naturally I jumped on the opportunity to run traffic to the offer.

In the past I have marketed on mobile networks such as Admob, Inmobi, and Mojiva.  I knew for a fact that Admob offered a “click-to-call” function for their mobile advertisers (so does Inmobi, don’t know about Mojiva) so I chose to try out their traffic.  Basically what happens is when someone clicks on your advertisement they are shown a message that states “Are you sure you want to call XXXXXXXXXX” Then the person clicks call or cancel.  Now, the theory behind this is that if someone clicks the call button then they genuinely want to call your company.  At least that was my thought on this process.

Here was the first banner creative

This was the first creative that was used.  This was a text version of an Admob ad.  Originally the ad just said “Free Debt Elimination Kit – Call Now!”.  However, we noticed a terrible CTR for the offer.  Because we were sending traffic after business hours we assumed that people just weren’t clicking.  Most people know that if you call after business hours you will have to deal with an automated system instead of an actual phone operator. So to combat the issue we put on Call 24/7 to the ad to help ease people’s minds. 21k impressions, 130 clicks, 6 confirmed calls, $48.xx spend, average $0.30 a click. Not the best… so we moved to a banner ad approach so we could add more info to the creative.

Here was the second/final creative

This was an actual image instead of using the Admob default background and custom text.  Image ads on mobile networks allow you to add more content to the actual creative.  You can also see that we were pre-qualifying people by letting them know that if they click they will need to continue with a phone call to us. The creative also let the surfer know what they would be receiving for calling in.   1,316,753 impressions, 9,871 clicks, $1,353.50 spend (about $0.14 a click)… you ready for this?… 410 calls.  That’s $4,100.  AWESOME RIGHT?  Well… yes and no… The advertiser wasn’t too thrilled about the quality of traffic… Don’t worry… they’re going to pay up… but…

Here is what I learned

Mid day we received a report of the traffic quality.  Unfortunately it was quite low. And here’s why…

Any good marketer knows that they should always track their stats with a third party company. For this project I chose to go with Dynamicic.com (a phone number tracking service). Dynamicic also offers the option to record the phone call so that you can hear what exactly is going on. Out of my own curiousness for how the calls went I made sure to turn on the recording function from the beginning.  After we received the report from the advertiser I went back and listened to about 50 phone calls.  While some of them were indeed real people the majority were remnant noises of little kids… WHAT?  Yeah… little tykes making their little googoo gaga sounds.

So… While I did make a HUGE return for the investment, the quality of the actual phone call was utter $#!^ to say the least.  This venture in mobile marketing taught me that 85%+ clicks on the advertisement come from kids that are playing with their parents phone.  Now… Normally this wouldn’t be an issue but when you have an advertiser that is paying you for a phone call of ANY length then this is a critical matter that needs to be resolved.

That traffic was ran on Friday.  Right now the campaign is paused until I can get a full report as to the quality of the leads. If it’s extremely bad I’ll just ask for a pay decrease and hope that I can keep pushing traffic.  Even at a couple dollars a lead I’ll still be making oodles of dinero from this campaign.

Here’s some screen shots for you

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