Getting Started with Pay Per Call Improving Conversions with Automated Routing

Ringba

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Learn how to use automated Call Routing to improve conversions and optimize your inbound Call Flows.



Lesson Transcript

Hey Pay Per Callers, let's talk about Improving Conversions and Conversion Rates with Automated Call Routing.

Optimizing Call Flows with Automated Call Routing

The top players in Pay Per Call are all using technology to maximize their revenues. In this lesson we're going to break down all of the industry standard features that most companies are using to improve their return on investment. Now, each one of these features applies to almost every single Pay Per Call campaign, and can be used either alone or in combination with each other. Most times they are used in combination with each other. A lot of the times every single one of these types of features is used on every single call route.

Maximize ROI by Prioritizing and Weighting the Flow of Calls

Now the first one we're going to talk about is prioritizing and weighting your buyers. For whatever reason you may want to prioritize certain buyers and lower the priority of others. Typically these are because maybe some are payment risks, or maybe some have really high error ratios, and drop a lot of calls. Maybe some of them don't convert as well, or maybe you just have better relationships with some of those buyers and you really want to send them more calls because you see other opportunities.

There can be a million reasons why you want to prioritize some buyers and give some buyers different weight configurations. This is how it actually looks when it's implemented. A publisher, or you perhaps, are going to get your tracking number, place your advertisement somewhere, probably on a mobile advertisement or a click to call ad. A customer is going to see that advertisement, they're going to pick up a phone, they're going to dial a number. That's going to go through your call tracking platform, and your call tracking platform is going to prioritize the route of that call.

Now, for whatever reason buyer one had a higher priority than buyer two and buyer three, and so they got the phone call. Payout comes back from them to you. Whether there's a network or a broker in there doesn't necessarily matter a whole lot. The point is, for whatever reason, buyer one was prioritized over the others.

Now, if you're not using your own call tracking platform, you're not going to be able to prioritize and weight your call flow so that you can decide where your calls are going. Essentially what you're going to be doing is just taking the phone number from wherever you got it, whatever broker, network, or advertiser gave it to you, and only they are going to receive phone calls, and so you're not going to have any control in that situation.

That's why the call tracking and routing platform, like Ringba, is essential to your business. Because without that, you really can't grow and scale it.

Automatically Reroute Busy Buyers

On this next example we're going to talk about what happens when you get a busy buyer. A busy buyer simply means when the customer calls, or your call tracking platform calls that buyer, they get a busy signal, and they don't answer the phone. Now buyers will do this because maybe all of their agents actually are on the phone, or maybe they just are working with a lot of different publishers and are overflowing their capacity on purpose, and whenever an agent's not available they busy signal that call so they don't have to pay for it. This is very common, by the way. When you're working with a buyer that's a call center, they want as many phone calls as they can possibly get at any given time, and they want every single agent they have on the phone always, because it maximizes the amount of money that they make.

One of the games a call center will play is they'll go out to a bunch of different sources, maybe to their direct publishers, maybe to their brokers and networks, and they'll tell those people that they have more capacity than they actually do. What happens is their agents are always full at all times. Then when they aren't going to take a phone call, or they don't have capacity, they turn on a busy signal and now you have to deal with that phone call.

If you have a call tracking platform, and you're using Ringba, that's not an issue at all really. This game doesn't apply to you. You're not really going to take any monetary loss or suffer any problems because of it.

Now, if you're just working directly with a network, you absolutely are going to suffer because most of the time they're going to get a busy signal, your call is going to drop, you have nowhere else for it to go. Now if you're lucky, that network or broker has their own platform and they have other buyers in line for that phone call.

Most call tracking platforms out there, especially the big ones that power most networks, do not really have sophisticated routing to handle errors and busy signals in a way that I consider the best way to do it. You're going to run into this issue when you're working with buyers, and that's why it's absolutely imperative to have your own call tracking platform.

A publisher, or you, is going to generate this phone call using a tracking number placed on an advertisement. Then a consumer is going to see it. Now the consumer picks up their phone, they call the phone number, it goes into Ringba, and Ringba's going to dial buyer one. Now buyer one sends a busy signal, and immediately when that busy signal happens, in a fraction of a second, just a few milliseconds, we detect that busy signal and then immediately dial buyer two.

The consumer on the phone would never even notice this. It happens so quickly that no human can detect it. You make sure that the phone call gets connected with a buyer that actually wants it, that has capacity available, and you get paid for it. Buyer two accepts that phone call. The payout comes back to the publisher, you, and you get paid for it whether it's through a network or not.

Reroute Non-answered Calls

Next we're going to look at rerouting non answered phone calls. What happens in this situation is very similar to the busy signal situation, but instead of hitting the phone call with the busy signal, which in a lot of cases is more preferential to you because that busy signal gives you immediate notice in real time that the phone call is not going to get connected. Some call centers do not have that capability, so instead of using a cue, what they will do is just let the phone call ring. They'll let it ring, and ring, and ring, 30 seconds, a minute, whatever the case is. Because instead of bouncing that phone call with the busy signal, if it just rings, they still potentially have the opportunity to answer it if an agent becomes available.

In this situation, if you have a buyer that's doing this, it's really important that you're billing them on duration from phone call ringing as opposed to duration from answering the phone call if there are duration requirements. Duration requirements simply mean that no payout event happens until a specific duration of the call. Someone has been on the call for a specific length of time, like a minute, or two minutes, or whatever the buyer and you have negotiated.

What happens in this circumstance when the phone's ringing, and ringing, and ringing, is consumers start to give up and they hang up the phone, and then you don't get paid for it. The buyer had an opportunity to answer the call that entire time, so they actually received value for that. They had the option to answer the phone call, and that's the value they received. If one of their agents became available, bam, they answer the phone and then they can maximize the yield of their floor. This puts you in a bit of a precarious position if you don't have control over your call flow. This is why it's super important again that you have your own call tracking, even if you're working with networks and other buyers, so that you can have control over this.

In this situation, you're going to generate your phone call with a tracking number on an ad. The consumer calls, it goes into your call tracking platform, and now there's a timeout associated with the ringing. Inside of the Ringba configuration on a buyer or target level, you can actually configure how long we'll let the phone call ring until we reroute it to another buyer for you. Buyer one is ringing, maybe it's five seconds you give them, maybe it's ten. It just rings, and then once that timeout period happens, you take the option away from the buyer and we automatically reroute to another buyer that may be available. This is a way that you can recapture a significant amount of value in your call flow.

Just so you guys are aware, the more calls you have, the more value you will lose by not having solutions like this in place. As you start to drive more calls, maybe it's just a few when you get started, and then maybe it's 20 or 50 a day, and you start doing thousands of phone calls a day, like many of our clients do, or tens of thousands of phone calls a day, which is completely normal in this space. If you don't have things like this in place, you're just going to get absolutely murdered by your buyers. It's super important that you understand how this works.

Simultaneously Dial Buyers and Sell to the First to Answer

Now, next I want to talk about simultaneously dialing buyers and selling to the first one to answer. Now there's a few reasons why you would want to do this, and there's actually a few downfalls to this as well, and we're going to cover all of them.

Simuldial essentially means that we are going to dial all three buyers at the same exact time, or all five, or all 25, or all 600. It doesn't matter how many buyers you have, we're going to dial them at the same time, and the first one to answer the phone call gets it. This is a great way to maximize the number of calls that get answered. Depending on your requirements, your buyer requirements, and depending on how much each of the buyers are paying, this can actually be a lower return on investment scenario for you, depending on how you want to do it.

Now, in more sophisticated call routes inside Ringba, you can actually simuldial a specific group of buyers, and then if they don't answer, we'll reroute the call based on how much other buyers are paying and a bunch of other criteria. This can become a really complicated scenario, and you definitely want to talk to your account managers about your options here. Let's run real quick through what a simple simuldial scenario looks like.

The publisher, or you, is going to take your tracking number, put it on an ad. A consumer sees that ad, picks up the phone, calls. It routes through Ringba. Ringba simultaneously dials, so at the exact same time, concurrently, we dial buyer one, buyer two and buyer three. Now they all may start ringing. Buyer two may hit with a busy signal. Buyer three may have a technology error. We don't know, maybe they just all ring and buyer one picks it up the fastest because they have a hold cue, and so no matter what they pick it up quickly. Then buyer one issues the payout for this phone call, whether it's through a network or directly to you, or whatever the case is. The payout event happens if that call meets the conversion criteria.

Now where this can get a little bit sticky is if your buyers have different geographic requirements, or different campaign requirements in general, and you need to route by those. If all of your buyers take nationwide phone calls, this isn't necessarily an issue. If half of your buyers only take west coast and half take east coast, if you configure it this way it can be a problem.

Now it can also produce less money for you as well. If buyer one pays $10, buyer two pays $22, and buyer three pays $6, and buyer three is always the fastest to answer the call, this could be a very expensive situation for you. You need to take into account how much money all of the buyers are actually paying you, and what the campaign criteria are, before you implement some type of simuldial routing plan on these campaigns.

Now, if buyer one, two and three all take entirely national traffic, which means they'll take a phone call from anyone, let's say in the United States, or the US and Canada. Then let's also say that they're all paying essentially the same amount. Buyer one's paying 10, buyer two is paying 10, buyer three is paying 10.25, which is essentially irrelevant. What we want to do is maximize how quickly the calls get answered so that we make the most money possible.

Now this is also a really great scenario when there's no duration requirement. If your buyers are all paying you on raw phone call, which means they pay you as soon as they answer the phone call, you would absolutely want to simuldial in that scenario, because realistically speaking you don't care how good their sales people are. You don't care what the duration requirements are. You get paid on raw call, so you want them answered as soon as humanly possible 100% of the time, if all the payouts are essentially the same. That's the perfect scenario for a simuldial, is all the campaign criteria is exactly the same, and everyone's paying you about the same, and they're all paying you on raw call. That's where you could really make a lot more money with simultaneously dialing your buyers.

Duplicate Call Routing

Okay, so duplicate call routing. Just real quick, a duplicate call is when a caller picks up the phone, dials it, calls, they're connected with an agent. Then they pick up the phone, they dial it, and they call again. You could make a lot of money by managing your duplicate call flow properly. If you're working with a network and you do not have your own call tracking, you have absolutely no control over this, and the network like 98% of the time, or even higher than that, are not going to pay you for a duplicate phone call.

That sucks because based on the statistics in our platform across hundreds of different verticals and industries, we typically see on the low end at least 5% duplicate calls, and on the high end sometimes up to 25% duplicate calls. If you think about that, anywhere in that range, whether it's low or high, if you could monetize all of those, or a percentage of those phone calls, that's nothing but pure profit in your pocket. You need to manage your duplicate call flow appropriately or you're just leaving a ton of money on the table.

Now again, if you're working with a network, they're most likely going to sell their duplicate calls to multiple parties on the back end, but they are only going to pay you once per caller. This is how a network also maximizes their yield. By using your own call tracking, you can take away the ability for a broker or a network to actually make money with duplicate call routing on your back essentially. You can take their margin right away from them without them having any idea that you're doing this. That's a really good thing, because it gives you control over your profitability.

What happens here is a publisher, or you, generates a tracking number, you place your ads. Consumers see it, they pick up the phone and dial. It goes through Ringba. Now, buyer one bought this call the first time.

Let's just assume for a minute that they bought it, they paid for it, and you got that money. Now for whatever reason the consumer called back. Maybe they're looking for auto insurance, and maybe they talked to someone at buyer one, and they were not happy with how they were treated by buyer one, or the guy they were talking to was new, or the agent didn't do a good job, or whatever. I mean, there's an endless list of reasons on why someone would call, talk to someone, and then pick up the phone and call the same phone number. Either way, they weren't taken care of. That's not your fault. That's not your problem.

If you generated a legitimate phone call using legitimate advertising, and the call center didn't close that person, that's it. That's their fault. That's their problem. You have a recording of it, because you're using your own call tracking, so if there's a dispute, you have proof that it was legit and all that good stuff.

The consumer picks up the phone and dials your tracking number again. Now again, if you're working with a network, you're just not going to get paid for it, but they're going to get the phone call and they're going to route it somewhere else. With your own call tracking, you're going to automatically route that duplicate call in milliseconds. We just look and see if the person's called before, and we route them to buyer two. Now buyer two has no relationship with this caller, they've never seen their caller ID before. As far as they're concerned, it's a fresh call. They talk to the person, it converts. Maybe they sell them, maybe they don't. Again, not your problem, and a payout is issued.

In this scenario with a duplicate call, when properly managed, you actually get paid twice, or sometimes three times, four times, five times. We've seen duplicate call routing plans re-monetize the consumer five, six, seven, eight, nine, probably more in some very rare circumstances, times. That means the person that configured their duplicate routing rules is maximizing the value of these repeat callers, and then taking the ability away from the broker or network to do this same thing. I think that's the most important part.

If you just use duplicate call routing and you're working with networks or brokers, that alone will pay for your call tracking platform. I just want to let that sink in for a second. If you just only use duplicate call routing, in almost 100% of scenarios, this alone will pay for your own call tracking. Then everything else you do with it, all the other money you make with it, and all the control you get with it, is all just profit, it's gravy. That's why this type of methodology with using your own call tracking, even if you're an affiliate, or you're a network, whatever the case is. Wherever you are, even as your own buyer, is really, really important.

Let's say you're a call center, and call center is like, well I can just track my phone calls using my PBX, and I send out an Excel spreadsheet and whatever. All right, well that's great. Good for you, but what if you have duplicate callers calling back in? It didn't work for you the first time. You can then sell your overflow or all your duplicates, or people who didn't like you for whatever reason the first time, into one of your competing call centers.

Which may seem counterintuitive, but the beautiful thing about phone calls is that you have to work with your competitors essentially so that you can sell your overflow, if you're a call center, to someone else. Otherwise you just lose that money. We have a lot of calls centers that use Ringba, and they actually work with all their competitors to sell their overflow or their duplicate calls to other people so that they can maximize their yield.

Now this only applies to certain campaigns. Some campaigns customers will keep calling back thinking that's the customer service number. Depending on whether you're an affiliate or a buyer, your use of this can be very, very different. There's other rules inside Ringba as well, so if you want, you can force a repeat caller to go to the same buyer over and over again, depending on the type of campaign.

We do give you control of that, so just because you can resell your duplicate calls to multiple buyers inside of the Ringba apparatus, it doesn't mean you always have to. Depending on what campaign you're running, or why and what the reasons are, you can handle your duplicate calls a whole bunch of different ways.

The point here is that when you have your own call tracking you get control. With control, it means you get competitive advantage, and you have a leg up on people who aren't using their own tracking platform. That's what's really important. Any time in business you want to create competitive advantage, and when you can do that through automation and technology, that's how you can build a really big business, make millions of dollars, and whatever. I really believe this.

For those of you that don't know me, I started in my parents' basement when I was a teenager, trying to figure out how to make money on the internet while I was going door to door in downtown Detroit, pitching people phone service through bulletproof glass. I didn't want to do that anymore, and so I was like, man, I want to figure out how to make some money on the internet. The first time I made some money on the internet, it was when I finally started using technology to help me do it. This is really important. It's really powerful, and you need to understand how all of this works.

Geographic Routing

All right, so next let's talk about geographic routing. Geographic routing simply means we are going to route phone calls by the geographic location of the caller. It doesn't necessarily matter where a call center is. I mean, you can have a call center that's located in Texas but is licensed to say maybe do mortgages in Massachusetts. It doesn't necessarily matter where the call center is, but what matters in campaigns that are georouted, is where the caller is calling from.

Now most call tracking platforms will only route by area code. This is a flawed methodology. For instance, the tracking platform that a lot of networks use does all their statistics based on area code. Again, that is a flawed methodology. Why? Why is it flawed? Well I'm not in Michigan right now. Okay. You can see it's like nice outside. It's the middle of winter. My cellphone has a 248 area code, because I'm from Metro Detroit, and so many people have that phone number I can never change it. I'm stuck. Forever am I from 248, the area code.

35% approximately of all people have a different area code from where they're located. That's important to realize because if someone calls from a 248 area code but doesn't live in Michigan, well they're going to get connected to the wrong call center. You can do routing by area code, it is somewhat effective, but you're essentially going to be burning a lot of your call flow.

We're going to talk later about how to route specifically by where a user physically is located, not their area code, which is one of the things that Ringba does better than any other platform out there. We actually give people full granular control over all of that data. With our number pool technology, we're able to figure out the actual zip code, city, state, country, latitude and longitude if you want, of where a caller is coming from. Then inside of our platform you can actually make routing decisions by that information. That's really valuable to companies that have to georoute, because they can maximize their revenue a whole different way.

Let's run through this real quick, and let's run through the problems with area code route, and we'll talk about it more. A publisher creates a tracking number. They place that number on a mobile advertisement and a consumer sees it. Now the consumer picks up the phone, they dial the phone number, it goes through Ringba, and Ringba makes a routing decision. Now in this case let's say it's done by area. Ringba looks at the area code and they go, oh, it's Adam, it's Michigan. All right, I'm going to route it to buyer two, because Michigan takes buyer two. All right, great. Sounds good.

Now let's say in another scenario it routes to buyer one, because buyer one is a nationwide buyer, they can take callers from anywhere. That one converts, a payout is issued back to the publisher, whether it's a network or it's not.

Now maybe, for instance when I'm routed to buyer two, I'm no longer qualified because I don't live in Michigan. The agent picks up the phone and they're like, "Hey, how's it going?" I'm like, "Great, I want auto insurance." They're like, "Cool. Where you located? I see you're calling from Michigan." I'm like, "Oh, I'm sorry. I live in Alaska." They're like, "Oh, well we're not licensed there. Sorry. Good luck. We can't help you." Click.

Now in an insurance campaign where there's geographic locations, there's almost always going to be a duration based billing component, which means that you're only going to get paid when the call is 60 seconds, or a minute, or whatever. I don't know how long it took me to run through that scenario, but it was what? Like 10, 15 seconds at most. They're going to qualify me as someone that they can't issue insurance to, and hang up the phone.

If you use area code based geo-routing, you're leaving a lot of money on the table. A lot of Pay Per Call Networks do this. Seriously, a lot of them do it this way because it's easy on them. It doesn't matter. They're just brokering. If these calls don't get paid for, that's not really their problem. That's the affiliate's problem, and so they don't care. Again, based on the technology you're using, maybe it's not that they don't care, they just actually can't do anything about it.

If your technology can't do what Ringba does, you're kind of in a shitty situation because you have no other choice. If you're a network, you just dump that responsibility on the affiliate, it doesn't cost you anything to do this. Your buyers have the duration based campaigns in place, so they don't lose anything. What happens is the affiliates end up eating all this lost value, and they don't have any idea that it's actually happening if they're not using their own tracking, because they don't have recordings of the calls.

They just assume everything is great, and it's a really unfortunate situation because most affiliates don't use their own call tracking platform. Which again, is really dumb. It does have cost to it, but you can see here how it would be really valuable to actually know this information and route by it. Because if 35% of area codes are wrong, that means that approximately 35% of the time, based on what's going on with your call flow, there's a chance that you may not get paid for a phone call where someone actually wants to buy insurance, or whatever the product is, but they can't do it because of licensing.

Instead, with our number pool tracking technology, you can do the same thing by zip code of the person's physical location. On your landing page, you drop our JavaScript on there. It's super simple, and we're actually going to get the physical real location of the caller, and then we're going to drive that into whatever buyer is actually licensed to take that call.

If you're using that technology, you're going to have an almost 100% hit rate on making sure that your calls go to the right buyers, and your conversion rate's going to jump up through the roof. You're going to make a lot more money when you use actual geographic routing versus area code routing in these scenarios. It's really important that you understand how that works if you're going to work in a space that requires licensing, like insurance, and you have to have a spread of buyers that have different coverage in different geographic locations.

Now another workaround for this situation is also in your campaigns, if your traffic provider allows it, to subdivide all of those campaigns into geographic regions. If you're working with Google AdWords, for instance, maybe you have a campaign that's Michigan, and a campaign that's Texas, and a campaign that's California, and one that's every single state. If you do it that way, then you can pass in the URL some information to your landing page, or use 50 different tracking numbers, which seems inconvenient, but if you want to get your conversion rate up it's just a little bit of work to get the job done.

Then you talk to your buyers and you say, "Listen, I'm only routing you calls that are from people who are physically in Wisconsin, and it doesn't matter what the area code is." That's why in situations where you're doing geographic routing you really need to have an amazing open line of communication with all your buyers. Whether they're a network, a broker, a direct buyer, it does not matter. You have to have great communication with them.

Because most of these people are used to doing this with area code specific routing, and they need to be aware that you're going to be more sophisticated, and they need to watch out for that. Because otherwise you're going to get a report back that's like, "Hey, 15% of your callers were not from Wisconsin. We don't want to pay for these." Maybe they even sold a bunch of them, but they're still going to try. Even if they sold people, and knew they were in Wisconsin, some of these buyers are going to try to charge back those phone calls. You should expect it.

This is technically affiliate marketing, and so you need to stay on top of everybody in the value chain. You should expect that, and that's why it's super important that you have the really good communication with your buyers, so that you can implement different ways with technology to qualify people before they get to the buyer, so that they're not only looking at the area code. Because if they're only looking at the area code, you're just going to lose a whole bunch of money, and that may be enough money for you to up your bids to get you to the top of everything.

If all your competitors are doing it the old school antiquated crappy way, and only doing area code, when you go to bid against these people, if you can create a better way to do it, or use technology to do it, you're going to make a lot more money, which allows you to bid more for the calls, which means you're going to get your volume way up. Then you become the premiere provider of calls, and so on and so forth, and that's how you build a business in this space or any space.

Your goal this entire time is to create competitive advantage that you can use to outdo people who either don't have the technological capability, don't understand how it works, or are just really lazy. A lot of times it's a combination of those, and when it's a combination of those, it's amazing, because it's not hard to compete. You just work a little bit harder, you work smarter, and you just win without really doing a whole lot differently than anybody else. Just by understanding how this works.

Demographic Routing

Let's talk about demographic routing. Demographic routing can mean routing by a whole bunch of different things. I was at a trade show recently, and I spoke with a woman who runs recruiting for a major university. They were really concerned about how they fill specific demographic buckets. With universities, they're required to enroll a certain percentage of people that come from a different ethnic background. That's the law on universities, and they struggle with this, because they don't necessarily understand how to do that. Then how do you track your inbound phone calls to the recruiting office and sort them by demographic and deal with all that? It's a really complicated problem.

Then also there's other type of demographic indicators that certain campaigns require. In this example right here, we're talking about a debt consolidation company, and they really only want to buy phone calls from people that have more than $10,000 in unsecured debt. That gives them a lot more wiggle room for their product. You know, if someone only has $500 in debt, how much can you really charge that person to solve the problem? Not a lot, because it doesn't work that way. If they have $40,000 in credit card debt, charging them $500 or $1000 to help them clean it up isn't that big of a deal. That's why they want people with more debt. A lot of the time in the debt space you have attorneys that are doing this, and they don't want to sue and deal with all the court fees and all the nonsense for only a couple hundred bucks. They need people who are better candidates, that have better demographics for their specific campaign.

This can apply to anything. It can be rich people, poor people. It can be people that work in different job types. It can be people of different age groups. It can be people who like different things. Demographics can be a really wide assortment of qualification criteria.

Now let's talk about the debt example first, and then we'll talk about what you can actually do theoretically with technology. In this example we have a publisher, you, that is taking their tracking number, placing it on an ad somewhere. A consumer calls that ad, it goes through Ringba, and we qualify this person for over $10,000 in debt. Now, how do you do that? A lot of the time it's done with interactive voice response. It's going to say, "Thank you for calling Debt Busters. Please press one if you have more than $10,000 in debt. Please press two if you have less than $10,000 in debt." Whatever those options are. In the debt scenario a lot of times this is done with IVR, but it's still considered a demographic. You're still looking at some type of qualification criteria to get this person to the right buyer.

In this scenario let's say the caller has more than $10,000 in credit card debt and they selected that through an IVR. Buyer one here in this example, they'll take over $10,000 in credit card debt or unsecured debt. They're going to pay $25 for that, but they can only take 10 per day. This is the first time we've looked at capping inside of a call flow. A lot of the times with your buyers, they're only going to buy so many calls from you per day, per week, per month. Now this can be because at first they want to assess quality, so you should totally expect that a new buyer is only going to give you a limited amount of capacity, because they have to have actual humans answer the phone. There's risk for them to take those phone calls.

I think that's really important. A lot of people get frustrated when they get a new buyer or they work with a network, the network's like, you can only send 10 calls a day. Then the affiliate's like, but bro, I could send 300 calls a day. All right, well you know, the buyer has to put a human available on the phone to take those calls, and then attempt to determine if those calls are worth anything, or if they're not fraud or if there's a problem. That's why they cap initially the amount of calls. It's really fair and you should want those caps, because once you prove your traffic is quality, that means anyone else that wants to sell to these buyers are going to have to go through that process too. It keeps your competitors out.

Don't be offending by the capping. Don't worry about the capping. If you have legitimate calls and someone caps you, that's a good thing, because it means it's a lot more complicated for them to bring someone else into the campaign and take their calls. Just go through the process. Be cool about it, and understand why the process is there. Then you can build a great relationship with your buyers, your networks and your brokers so that other people are excluded from these campaigns.

That's something we should note, is that Pay Per Call is an exclusionary situation for the most part. Because you have to have a human to answer the phone, which means you have to pay that person. It's not like eCommerce, where someone comes to your site, they buy, they don't buy, it doesn't matter. It's very important that everything is proven. Unlike most affiliate marketing, instead of being inclusive, which is, hey let's get as much traffic as we possibly can. Let's get as many publishers running this as we possibly can. It's the opposite. It's exclusionary. They're like, let's test people in small amounts, and if we like them and their quality's good, then we can let them grow with us.

Now what you get when it's exclusionary is you get a much better long term opportunity. Instead of short, it's super long. You can build a real business with it. That's why I like it.

Anyhow, back to this example. Buyer one, they liked the call. They make the payout to the publisher. Maybe it goes through a network, maybe it doesn't. Now if this person selected that they had less than $10,000 in debt, we'd automatically route that call to buyer number two or buyer number three, depending on the payout, or their capacity, or whatever. If I'm looking at this specific example, obviously I'm going to want buyer two to take that call because they're paying an additional $5. Once they cap out, once they've taken their 10 calls a day, then it automatically gets routed to buyer three, and we're getting $10 a call. Maybe that breaks even and allows us to keep running the campaign, maybe $10 a call is still profitable. Whatever the case is, that's how you kind of waterfall your routing in a demographic based environment.

Now, if you're using our number pool technology, that's where you can get really sophisticated with demographics. If you're creating social ads on Facebook, or you're getting your demographic information from your traffic source, with number pools you can actually pass that data to your landing page. We're going to grab that data about the user, and then you can make routing decisions by that data.

If you have an advertisement that targets low income people, for instance, you can actually flag that, tag it as it comes in to Ringba, and then route by that information. If you're running specific advertisements like the university example, where you need to know the ethnicity or the background of the person, let's say they submit a lead, and inside that lead they're selecting their ethnicity, you can then pass the lead data into Ringba.

On the thank you page where they're like, "Hey, you qualify for whatever university. Please give us a call." Now the person picks up the phone and calls, and then we know what ethnicity they are and we can route them based on priority. If that university specifically has a need for a certain ethnicity, they can prioritize that phone call, make sure it gets answered. It can route to a more priority cue based on how you configure it, and then you can make sure that your higher value callers are getting answered.

In a lot of cases when you're working with a network, they're going to be less sophisticated. They're going to offer you less options. Unfortunately a lot of them use technology that does not allow waterfall payments. It's either $10 for a call or no bucks for a call. It's binary. They don't have a lot of options.

Now with Ringba, if you're working with a Ringba network, these people can actually pay you based on call criteria. They can have 25 different payouts for the same call stream based on demographic information, geographic location, length of the call, all sorts of stuff.

To give you an example, when you're doing demographics, if your network is using Ringba, you want to talk to them about which demographics are most valuable to them, and then you can pass this data in and get a different payout for it. Let's say you're looking at the ethnicity example and you have the one that's the most important, maybe that one pays 20, and the one that's least important pays 10. Those payout at a two minute duration. They'll take any raw phone call at $8, regardless of demographic, so if you have no information on some of these callers, you can negotiate a different payout for that.

What this does is allows you to tier based on the quality of call, and it makes everybody in the value chain a lot more money. If you're able to pass demographic information properly, and properly organize it in your call flow, and then negotiate correctly with buyers, depending on the type of campaign, you can maximize not only the amount of money that you make, but you can maximize the amount of money that the network makes. You can maximize the amount of money that the buyers make.

Let me give you another example of this. Let's talk about a mortgage campaign. We have a really amazing client that talked to us about this, and they're like, yeah, I'm doing mortgage calls, and I don't remember the exact amount they were getting paid per call. Let's call it $10 to make it nice and easy. They're getting paid $10 per nationwide phone call. Then they realized if they went to regional buyers of mortgage calls that are on a state basis, that they could get $20 per phone call, because they're cutting out a bunch of the middlemen, the aggregators that built these networks of buyers and put them together.

They start making $20 a call and they come to me and they're like, "Adam, how can I make more money?" I said, "Well, what's valuable to a buyer of a mortgage?" They're like, "Well, loan amount. The customer's demographic information." I'm like, okay, perfect. What we need to do is figure out, in whatever states you have the most volume to get started, what zip codes have the highest home value. Then that was easy enough to find, it took us maybe five minutes of googling.

Then we realized very quickly that a loan officer at a buyer that's doing a loan on a house in, say Beverly Hills, 90210, where the average home value is $4.5 million, is worth a hell of a lot more money than a random caller with a $200,000 home in, say Compton or something. They were like, oh, light bulb. We need to do demographic routing combined with geographic routing. What they ended up doing was finding all the zip codes in California to start that had higher home values. They put that information into routing plans, and now they sell phone calls they used to get $10 for, for up to $250 a phone call because some buyers were absolutely willing to pay more money for the quality calls.

The smarter buyers were like, yeah, of course, send me all your 90210 calls. I'll pay you $250 a piece, and I don't even want the other ones. He has a few call buyers now that spend a ton of money per phone call, in an industry where the average payout is like $10 to $20, or $25. They figured out how to carve out hundreds of dollars a phone call in certain scenarios. Now these guys dump their low quality calls on networks instead. Then the nationwide aggregator, who doesn't have the technology in place, who hasn't thought this process through, that isn't using Ringba, then just assumes they're normal mortgage calls and everyone's happy because it's the same normal rate.

Understanding how to route by demographic information, and figuring out which buyers are willing to pay more for certain demographics, can literally make you a fortune if you do this properly. That's a great segue into IVR selection and qualification.

IVR Selection / Qualification Routing

IVR, for those of you that aren't familiar, is simply interactive voice response. It's one of those prompts that you get when you call customer service and it's like, you know, for an issue with your phone service, press one. To talk to the billing department, press two. Now in Pay Per Call it typically sounds like, for sales, press one. For customer service, press two. Because they want to filter off the customer service calls and route the sales one directly into the sales call center.

IVRs can be used for a lot of really cool things. Ringba has some incredibly IVR features built into our drag and drop interface. You can create an extremely complicated IVR in our system in just a matter of a few seconds. Where, if you're using someone else's, it can take you a long time, or maybe you can't even do some of the functionality.

We also have text to speech in 15 different languages, male and female. If you want to take your campaigns overseas, or you really want to make these things fast without going out and doing a bunch of professional recordings, which take time, our system's super flexible and allows you to do that.

Let's say you're driving a phone call, you're using a tracking number, it's shown on an ad. A consumer picks up the phone, dials that phone, routes through Ringba, and it hits an IVR menu. It says, "Thanks for calling. Please press one for sales, press two for customer support." They press one, it goes to one of these buyers. Bam. Buyer gets it, makes a payout. For whatever reason it goes to buyer one. Very simple IVR example.

Now in most cases it's going to be more of a qualification scenario. If we use the debt buyer example that we did on the last slide, the debt buyer is going to ask, "Do you have more than $10,000 in credit card debt, or do you have less than $10,000 in credit card debt?" That IVR is going to sound like this, "If you have more than $10,000 in credit card debt, please press one. If you have less than $10,000 in credit card debt, please press two." In this scenario, based on the buyers, buyer one accepts one, buyer three will accept one or three, and buyer two accepts two. Buyer two wants people with less than 10k in debt. The other ones want people with more, or buyer three will take either, and are most likely going to pay you different amounts of money based on what that IVR qualification is.

In Ringba, one of the cool things you can do is for every single IVR selection, let's say for more than $10,000 in credit card debt, you can do routing by that, different payouts by that. All by the user's selection, which is really, really cool. Then if they have less or they press two, you can route it on a different routing plan with different payouts and different demographic routing, and all that good stuff, all based on what the consumer puts into their system.

Now let's say they press two for support. You run them into a voicemail. We have that, it's not an issue. They press two, if you want you can just disconnect the call. There's an endless amount of options that you have with IVR. You can fire a pixel when someone presses a different prompt, and then post all the data in our system out with that pixel to a CRM. You can do all sorts of really interesting things with IVR once you understand how this works.

Now also sometimes what happens with IVR scenarios is you qualify the customer but you do not have a direct relationship with buyer number one. Let's say that buyer number one is going through a network, and the network has their own IVR in there and refuses to remove it because they're like, that's how we qualify customers. What you hear a lot of the time, for people who aren't aware, is they go through one IVR, and then they're asked the same questions again in another IVR. That just pisses the consumer off. It's just stupid. It doesn't do anyone any good, and it drastically removes the conversion rates. A lot of times the networks or the buyers don't care because maybe they don't have the facilities in place to run quality assurance to make sure that someone's not defrauding them by just sending anybody in without that IVR qualifier.

What you can do with Ringba is you can automatically dial the selections in your buyer's IVR so that the users don't hear them. Then what happens is they come in, they listen to your IVR, they press one because they have more than $10,000 in credit card debt. Ringba automatically connects the call to buyer one, automatically makes the IVR selections, you tell it to, and then the consumer is connected without that IVR, and you get the higher conversion rate because the consumer did not go through multiple IVR trees.

I cannot tell you how many times I've listened to a call recording, so many it's ridiculous, where the user is forced to go through multiple IVR trees that are exactly the same. Don't force your consumers to do that. Pay attention to what's going on. Listen to your call recordings. Like on the Pay Per Caller show, I've had the CEO of almost every single Pay Per Call Network on there, and 100% of them say, "Listen to your call recordings." Guys, just make the time to do it. Put it on in the background. Understand what's happening on your call flow.

Maybe your network, if buyer one is a network, has eight different buyers on their backend, and two of those eight buyers are really crappy or have stupid IVRs in place. You need to listen to these calls to make sure that someone else in the value chain isn't burning your opportunity to make money. If you don't have call tracking in place, there's like an extremely high likelihood that someone in the value chain, especially with networks, is burning your return on investment. Maybe not even maliciously. I'm not going to claim that it's maliciously.

In most cases, in most, the vast majority, it's probably not malicious. They just don't know because they have all these buyers and all these publishers. It's a lot of work to do quality assurance, and so you have to do your own to make sure that you're getting the maximum amount of value on every single one of these calls.

Routing Based on Hours of Operations

All right. Next, our routing based on hours of operation. This is real simple, but we're going to run through it anyways. You generate your tracking number, you place it on an ad. A consumer picks up the phone and calls, and Ringba takes a look at the hours of operation of all your buyers. If any of those buyers are closed, we don't send a phone call to them. Because if they're closed, they're not going to answer it. They're going to let it ring, and ring, and ring, or they're going to bounce it, or they are open, they're going to take the phone call and sell it, and then they're going to say, "Well publisher, we're not paying for this because you sent us a phone call after 6:00 PM."

This is something also to be aware of. One of the ways a network can make money is they can tell you the hours of operation are for 8:00 AM to 6:00 PM when they're really 8:00 AM to 7:00 or 6:30 PM. Then once that 6:00 PM cutoff happens, any remnant traffic or callers that come in after the cutoff, they still get paid for and you do not. That's what arbitraging the hours of operation looks like. That's why it's really important you have, again, your own call tracking, so that when a call comes in you follow all of the buyer's rules and criteria to make sure that you actually get paid for all of your phone calls. That's what the independent call tracking is about, it's so you can keep everybody honest.

Let's say it's one in the morning, someone calls in. Buyer one's only open from 9:00 AM to 9:00 PM Monday through Saturday. Buyer three is only open from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM Monday through Friday. Buyer two is open 24/7, so it doesn't matter what the payout is, if everyone's closed it goes to whoever is available and open. Very simply. A payout happens. Maybe it comes through a network. Maybe it doesn't. Maybe it goes through a broker. Maybe you're direct with the buyer. Doesn't matter. Payout is issued, you get paid.

Routing Based on Concurrency

All right, next is routing based on concurrency. I find that the more brokers or networks a call flow goes through, the less people are on top of their capacity and their concurrency. It's a lot to manage, and if you're talking to a buyer through a broker that's going through a network, and you're talking to the network account manager, they're not getting real time information from their buyer. They've got to go through a broker too. Maybe the buyer's not responsive. You run into an issue of capacity, which is the number of concurrent calls that can go to a buyer at any given time. That's why, if you're going to maximize your margin, eventually making direct relationships with buyers is going to be how you make the most money. Not necessarily because they're going to pay you more even, but because you have that direct line of communication and you can properly load balance your call flow.

When someone talks about load balancing their call flow based on CC, or concurrency, especially in chat they're going to call it CC. They're talking about the number of simultaneous phone calls that someone can handle at any given time. If a publisher says, "Hey, I've got 50 CC of auto insurance phone calls." That means they have 50 people at all times on the phone, talking to auto insurance sales people. If a buyer, for instance, says that they can handle 20 CC, that means they have 20 people available at any given time to take 20 simultaneous concurrent phone calls.

Now, you always want to ask, if you're working with a network, what the concurrency is. If anyone ever tells you, "Oh, we can take unlimited." They're full of shit, because that's not how a call center works. Call centers have people in them, and they need people to answer the phone. Now, let's think about this for a minute. To take unlimited phone calls you have to have unlimited people.

Now that's not possible, but let's just assume for a minute that you could take an absolute, giant amount of extra phone calls. What does that mean? That would mean that you have, I don't know, 50, or 100, or 1000 humans sitting around, doing nothing, getting paid for it, waiting around for a phone call to happen. Now, the most expensive part of any call center is the labor, it's actually the humans. The number one thing that any call center wants to fix is their call flow efficiency, and that means that for sales they want 100% of their sales people on the phone at any given time, so that they make the most money per call, per sales agent, they possibly can.

Very few call centers run at 100%. I don't even know if it's possible. The best I've ever seen is people reach the 90s. Simply because it's hard to manage call flow. When you're talking to a network, like I said, and they say, "Yeah, we have unlimited. We can take as many as we want." That is a recipe for disaster, because you're going to send a whole bunch of phone calls in there, they're not going to get answered. You're not getting paid for it. Network doesn't care, because if the phone call doesn't get answered and they don't get paid, you don't get paid. Of course the network's going to say, "Yeah, send as many phone calls as you can." Because well, if it doesn't get paid for, that's your problem. It's not theirs. It's important to understand the interests and alignments when you're working with these companies.

All right. Now if a network says to you, "Well, we have 10 concurrency available on this campaign." That's probably reasonable. They probably can work in an additional 10 CC because they're probably working with a whole bunch of buyers. If you add all their buyers together and look at the available concurrency on a nationwide campaign, an additional 10 CC is not that big of a deal. If they say 500, well, you should probably be concerned with that, or start asking them how they do their buyer network. Because if they're like, "Oh, we just have one giant buyer." That's really fishy, and you need to understand before you start slamming them with phone calls.

The way this works is this. The publisher, they get their tracking number. A customer calls it, Ringba's going to take a look at how many concurrent phone calls all the buyers have. You can configure the concurrency of a buyer flat, you can say they can take 10 CC at all times, or you can actually configure their hourly concurrency by day, which is really the best way to do it.

Real quick, let's talk about that. The best way to configure your concurrency if you're running calls to multiple buyers, is on an hourly basis, especially if you're direct with those buyers. Because call centers operate like any other business, humans got to take the calls, right? What do humans do? They use the bathroom and they eat stuff. At noon, lunch hour happens, and a lot of call centers do not run 15 minute shifts. They don't have people starting every 15 minutes. They run a shift like a normal business. They have them come in at 8:00 AM, or noon, or whatever it is. There's going to be fluctuation in the amount of humans available to take those calls, based on the hours of the call center's operation.

If you want to be smart about this, what you want to understand is, okay, Monday through Friday, what's your schedule look like? How does your concurrency change? The call center's going to say, "Oh, well maybe at noon is lunch hour, we lose 20% of our capacity. Shift change is at 2:00 PM, we get a lot more capacity then. Then at 7:00 PM, half the agents go home. We still want phone calls until 11:00, but we have half the capacity." What you're going to find is that most people aren't asking these questions to their buyers, and so they get a lot of no answers, they get a lot of rings, or busies, or whatever, because they don't actually understand the scheduling of their buyers.

As you get bigger on your bigger campaigns when you're working with direct buyers, you're going to want to have someone talking to their operations people every day. If you're talking to a 300 seat call center and you're sending them 50 to 70 concurrent calls at any given time, their staffing can change wildly. Typically a call center is going to staff 1.4 people for every person they actually need. The reason for that, especially at scale is that, well, humans call in sick, they have emergency issues, they've got to leave early, schedules change. People don't show up. People quit. You want to communicate with buyers as you grow, and the size of those buyers grow, to understand on a daily basis what their concurrency is so you can properly manage your call flow.

As you get into the thousands of phone calls a day, managing and optimizing your call flow is going to become a full time job. I don't know a single company that's running thousands of phone calls a day, or doing seven figures a month in call traffic, that doesn't have someone sitting on a multi screen setup with Ringba statistics all over it, all day long, rerouting, managing and communicating with all their buyers to make sure that they maximize their call flow yield. That's the fun thing about calls, you actually have to pay attention to it, and if you do it right, that alone is competitive advantage. You can just start to wipe the floor with people because you're willing to work hard, talk more, communicate better, and all that good stuff.

Back to the example. We're going to look at hourly concurrency. Buyer one's 10 out of 10, they're maxed. They're not getting anymore phone calls. Okay. As soon as someone hangs up the phone that's connected to buyer one, we'll automatically route them another phone call based on their priority, their waiting, their payout, all the stuff we've already covered.

Now buyer two, they're next in line. Why are they next in line? Maybe they pay more. Maybe they don't have technology issues. Maybe they're just better in general. Maybe they give better payment terms. Who knows, but buyer two is eight out of ten, that means they can take nine. They get the phone call, payout event happens, you get paid.

Buyer three for whatever. Maybe they're the worst buyer you have to deal with. Maybe they're a network. Maybe one and two are your direct buyers, and the network just handles your overflow. That may be the scenario here.

It's important to realize that there's a lot of uses for having a lot of buyers, whether they're aggregators, brokers or networks, direct buyers. You're going to want a mix of all these things so that you can manage your capacity appropriately. Networks usually take a pretty high margin, but if a phone call can't get answered, even if you take a loss on it through a network, you're better off to have the phone call answered so you get some money, as opposed to just letting it die.

That's what Pay Per Call is all about. That's the complicated part behind this, and the complicated part about wrapping your head around it is, your goal here is to get as many phone calls answered as possible without the caller hanging up, so that you get paid for as many phone calls as you possibly can. Like I said, a lot of people are really lazy with this, and a lot of people don't use technology to do it properly, that's why there is a ton of opportunity in this space.

We see people coming on our platform, learning it, and the smart ones make millions of dollars. I'm so proud of these people. I can't tell you, I don't even know how many people we've had come on our platform, start at zero, and start doing thousands of calls a day and making millions of dollars. It's an amazing thing to me. It's very rewarding, and it's one of the reasons why I'm doing this class, is so that we can help other people get into this space, do it properly, and they can build a real sustainable business so they can provide a better life for their family. The more you know about this stuff, the more successful you're going to be.


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