Google and Ebay Ink Click to Call Advertising Deal
Based on a Businessweek report, Google and Ebay have announced an exclusive deal where Google will provide all text advertising on Ebay International sites. This comes on the heels of a deal announced back in May between Yahoo and Ebay where Yahoo cornered exclusive advertising rights on their US based properties.
The key to this new announcement is the fact they are promoting the advertising medium of
“click to call” which allows a surfer to enter their phone number directly into the ad itself, where the system will then call both the surfer and the advertiser and connect them on a conference call. Both Ebay and Google have VOIP solutions through their respective GoogleTalk and Skype technologies.
This move is a definite boost to the concept, which had allot of hype when I first posted about it back in November last year, but hasn't really materialized into as popular of an advertising medium as I had originally thought. In my previous article I hailed Click Per Call as an advertising medium to watch since it provided a tangible and manageable process to online sales, something that PPC could only dream to achieve. An interesting comment came in lamenting the hype, stating that although Click per Call had some immediate applications, anything that didn't have a complex sales cycle wouldn't necessarily see an immediate benefit.
In hindsight the statement was quite prophetic, and IMO this deal was more to foster buzz and communicate the benefits of this advertising medium for both of their VOIP solutions versus anything really revenue related. Neither company is willing to confirm that this deal will affect their bottom lines for at least the next two years, and they were unwilling to commit as to which of their technologies would be used, so to me this has more of an awareness and marketing strategy behind the announcement than anything tangible from a revenue perspective.
