Pay Per Callers Show - Eric Evans, CEO of HyperTarget Marketing

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Discover how Eric Evans got his start in Pay Per Call marketing and went on to start and grow HyperTarget Marketing, a leading network in the call marketing space.

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Show Notes
  • Toughest Lesson: Don’t assume everyone will pay you!
  • Diversify your traffic sources. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.
  • Explore new opportunities and leave room to try something new.
  • Biggest Wins: Building a team and growing a company culture.
  • Understand how to manage the call flow (concurrency, capping, hours).
  • To be successful with Pay Per Call you need to be passionate about it!
  • Facebook Ads has a lot of competition but is less saturated than Google Ads.
  • Take the time to learn and understand how call tracking works.
  • As an affiliate, Pay Per Call Networks do all the heavy-lifting!
  • Networks primary goal is to make advertisers and publishers successful.
  • Biggest Opportunities: Bridging data with Pay Per Call (learn about TCPA laws!).
  • Be creative and explore new verticals. Pay Per Call is brand new and growing!
  • Listen to call recordings to understand customer intent and the back-end call flow.
  • Lots of growth and opportunity in the Senior space. They still make phone calls!


About HyperTarget Marketing

HyperTarget Marketing is a lead generation and call marketing solutions company based in Santa Monica, California. If you are a business that values phone calls or processes sales through a call center, we’ll increase call volume, leading to more sales.

HyperTarget Marketing Logo.png

Hypertargeting refers to the ability to deliver advertising content to specific interest-based segments. It is the cornerstone of precision performance marketing because ads are only shown to relevant people and ad dollars are NEVER wasted.

We understand the necessity of quality while providing plenty of opportunities to turn consumer’s information search into an actionable sale. With recent technological advances that turn tracking into traction, HyperTarget Marketing has been behind the movement and capitalized on industry changes since paid traffic and call metrics aligned.

HyperTarget Marketing sets the standard for call performance marketing. We work with our clients every step of the way creating specific goals and setting the right path to achieve them. Our call performance marketing platform delivers powerful performance through desired advertising channels, allowing you to have complete control over sales.

Website: www.HyperTargetMarketing.com


About Eric Evans

Eric Evans is an entrepreneur, founder of HyperTarget Marketing and an industry leader in the pay per call marketing space. Identifying the power of call generation advertising early on, HyperTarget works with brands and publishers in traditional and online media to identify ways to improve call-generation marketing. Eric is passionate about sharing his knowledge and helping the call marketing industry grow as a whole.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ericevans1

Episode Transcript

Adam Young:
Welcome to the Pay Per Call Show presented by Ringba. My name is Adam Young, and today we have special guest Eric Evans, the CEO and founder of HyperTarget Marketing based out of Santa Monica, California. HyperTarget is one of the industry leaders in the pay per call space. They've been around forever. Almost a decade now. Founded in 2009. And I'm very thankful Eric could join us on the show today. Eric, let's just jump right in. Take us back to the beginning. How did you get started in performance marketing?

Eric Evans:
Oh, sure. Well, it's a long, fun story. I was here in LA. I was working in the movie industry before my Internet life began. But yeah, I was doing special effects for movies. I loved it. And I got a bunch of movie credits. You can look me up on IMDb. They're still there.

Adam Young:
[crosstalk] [laughter].

Eric Evans:
I started making websites on the side. I had some technical skills, and I had some friends who were kind of getting involved in some Internet businesses. I didn't really understand what was going on. But I made a couple of sites, and some of them started getting traffic. And I didn't really know what to do or how to make money with a website. I mean, this is back in 2007 or so. But a couple of friends of mine who were in the industry kind of explained to me how affiliate marketing worked. And they were like, "Oh, there's this thing called Google AdSense and there's this other thing called performance marketing." And then, "Oh, well, this is a CPA network." And before I know it, I was working with Commission Junctions and the other networks back then just doing affiliate marketing. And I had a friend of mine who worked at Commission Junction. I won't name names here publicly, but he was a family friend. We were at Thanksgiving dinner, and we're having a few beers. I'm telling him about this stuff that I'm doing. I'm thinking about quitting my job and just doing this full-time. And he shows me the ugliest website I'd ever seen. It was a top five website for some dating website. And he's like, "Man, this site is making $200,000 a month." And I was like, "What? That's unbelievable. How is that even possible? This ugly, stupid, one-page website is pulling in that much cash?" So he explained to me a couple of things, and I basically just ripped it, and made another page for some other vertical. And within a couple of months, this dumb site that I built was making thousands of dollars a month. And it was close to my salary that I was making at this awesome movie industry special effects job. And I was like, "How is this possible that I worked on this for two months and I'm almost making my salary? A good job - a cool job - in the movie industry. How is this possible?" So I had to go for it, you know what I mean? I always had the entrepreneurial bones in my body. Quit my job, started doing this, and somewhere along the way, I stumbled onto Pay Per call. At the time, Pay Per Call was just on Commission Junction. That's all it was. So I started messing around with that, and I found a way to arbitrage Google call back in the day when click to call was pretty much unknown to people. I made a lot of money with [inaudible], which don't even exist anymore [laughter]. And yeah, I mean, before you know it that just became my thing, and it's grown from there.

Adam Young:
Very cool. And what were some of the early days like a HyperTarget when you were just getting started? What did that hustle and grind actually look like?

Eric Evans:
It looked like me in my pajamas in my living room with my laptop doing 500 things. Trying to buy media. Trying to do my own accounting. Trying to make my own websites. I mean, everything. I was a one-man band starting this and just through sheer willpower managed to make money. But the early days of HyperTarget what I consider a real company was when I finally was willing to give up a little bit of control and delegate, and hire people, and trust people, and train them. So that's when it really started. I hired a couple of people. And that was the hardest part for me initially was just delegating, you know what I mean? You have all these ideas in your head. You want to do everything yourself. You feel like you're the only one who can do it. But once you start to show people the path and become a real leader is when the business really started to take off in scale.

Adam Young:
And the beautiful thing about the affiliate industry is it's one of the last gold rushes that still exists. Someone can come in with no money, no experience, no education or background, anywhere in the world, and literally start making money overnight if they're creative and they're willing to put a lot of time in. And it sounds like your story is very analogous to a lot of other people in the space, mine included, where I just found an affiliate link one day and said, "What is this?" And it lead down this incredible rabbit hole, which got me to where I am today. And it sounds like this story is very similar for you. So what do you think some of your most painful lessons were? What hurt the most back in the day when you were getting started?

Eric Evans:
Oh, man. There was a few. I mean, I definitely took some bumps and bruises. I guess, naively, I assumed that everybody would pay me [laughter]. I'm trying to do things the right way. I'm building these websites and its traffic. Everybody's going to pay me. There's no way someone would just not pay me. So I learned that the hard way. And so I had to get all of our accounting dialed in, and understand payment terms and, just become a real businessman, you know what I mean? Just go from an employee mindset to a business owner mindset. It's an evolution as a person. And I'm excited when I see new people going through that. As much as I can help people that are trying to get their own thing off the ground I'm more than happy to. In addition to that, I mean, the other thing was probably not putting all your eggs in one basket, especially if that basket is Google, because they're not in it for the long haul with you if you're a performance marketer. So you've got to always kind of innovate. In the early days, there was a couple of tricks and Google made those tricks go away. So you got to constantly reinvent yourself and make sure that you're always looking at new opportunities or at least trying to get some new things off the ground. A part of what you're doing is, this is what you're doing, but always kind of save 10, 20 percent of your time for something new.

Adam Young:
And on the other side of that, what were some of your favorite big wins?

Eric Evans:
I mean, big wins? I would say, for me, more than anything building our team. It sounds old-school, but the first couple of people I hired we were working out of my apartment, but we kind of got to know each other, and then eventually we got an office, and we've really built a company culture here with an awesome team most of whom's been working here with me for years now. And everyone's happy. We have a good time. And I think our vibe, our culture, kind of rubs off on our clients. And they're like, "Hey. We want to work with these guys. These guys seem like a lot fun." So I think building that camaraderie, the team building, that kind of culture that we have, has been a big win for me. In addition, just the longevity of some of the things that we've been doing. I did start this in 2009. It seems like a long time ago. It's an eternity in Internet years. And some of those campaigns are still running. The same clients that I've been working with for close to 10 years now. It's unbelievable. I see them at the trade shows, and it's like I'm seeing an old friend, legitimately. So I think that really says something, the staying power we've had, and the fact that we've just consistently grown organically. Never had to take any money from anybody to build this business, and just kind of naturally evolved and grew as things went along. So I'm really proud of that.

Adam Young:
That's the interesting thing about Pay Per Call is that the campaigns don't disappear every two weeks. You're not [crosstalk] something. You're not fighting your way uphill every single time you do a campaign. These things last a very long time. And that's why a lot of people are very excited about the Pay Per Call space. We see a lot of affiliates coming over from CPA, learning Pay Per Call, and then staying here simply because they don't have to rebuild their entire campaign and marketing method every few weeks. And that's one of the amazing things that really helps the Pay Per Callers move their business forward. Outside of that, what do you think are some of the other important differences between Pay Per Call, CPA, and the tactics to actually make those campaigns work?

Eric Evans:
It's kind of a different mentality. I guess the advertisers and the hand holding that goes with dealing with advertisers is very different. Most of your clients, if you're-- if you've never had clients in the Pay Per Call space, I mean, they're call centers. There's human beings there answering calls. There's a finite number of people who can take a finite number of calls per day or per hour. And managing that flow is very different. For someone who comes from the CPA world, and they're either selling some Nutra product, or some kind of tactical flashlights, or whatever's out there that's hot, it doesn't matter when the traffic comes in, right? It's just you go into a shopping cart, someone buys it you figure it out. Maybe you've got to worry about the clients' inventory or something, but really, you just run your traffic. If there's a spike in traffic from some email campaign you're doing, it doesn't really matter. But with Pay Per Call, you have to be considerate of the fact that there's people on the other end answering these calls. If the calls aren't good, people are upset at having to speak to all your crappy calls. That's something that's way different from Internet marketing. There's this human element to it, which I actually really like. It feels more real in some ways Pay Per Call. And that's part of why I love it.

Adam Young:
What advice do you give to people just getting started in Pay Per Call?

Eric Evans:
The biggest advice is just being passionate about it. For me, I'm very passionate about it. Hopefully, it's coming across in this interview. But I love it. I love learning about it. I love learning about new industries. Every time we get into a new vertical and I just kind of get to understand how the back end of some other business works, it's eye-opening for me. I love doing it. So finding something that you like, I mean, if you're trying to build a website and write content about something you just don't care about, that's going to end poorly. You're going to get bored. You're going to be, "What's the next opportunity? What's the next shiny object I can go after?" You have to really like it. And the same kind of goes for the traffic source too. If you learn how to run Google Ads and you like doing that, focus on Google. But if you don't, go to a different traffic source. You're going to get bored trying to grow your website with traffic if you don't like the other half too. So you kind of have to like both ends of it.

Adam Young:
Speaking of traffic sources, what traffic sources are good for Pay Per Call that are outside of the obvious Google Ad ones?

Eric Evans:
Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't recommend someone jump into doing Google Ads or mobile search right now. It's just competitive and it's saturated. I mean, some good traffic sources that people maybe aren't as-- I mean, Facebook is obviously saturated too, but I think there's still more opportunity there with Google. I mean, the problem is, I think there's a lot of consolidation now that kind of Google, Facebook, and Amazon sort of rule the world and everyone knows it now. So you can't really-- you can't avoid going through those three people. But yeah, I mean, I would say pick something you're interested in. And it also depends on, I guess, your skill set and your budget. If you're technical and you're good at making websites, maybe focus on that, like link building and stuff. If you're good at writing content, maybe do something there. Whatever it is that you like doing, there's a traffic source that's out there. If you're super technical, maybe even Pops or something. There's a lot of different things. There's a lot of weird stuff out there on the Internet. You could find something.

Adam Young:
What are some of the tools that you would recommend for affiliates to use to get to started in Pay Per Call or even just grow and scale their business?

Eric Evans:
I mean, there's a lot of great tools out there. I mean, there's a lot of different tracking platforms and things like that that are doing well these days. I mean, there's obviously Ringba. There's Invoca. So there's a lot on the inbound side that you kind of have to understand how all the call tracking works to be successful. So in addition to driving traffic and generating the phone calls, getting your head around the call routing and concurrency limits and dynamic numbers and things like that. Just getting your head around how all that works is definitely going to help for Pay Per Call because it is unique. I mean, that part of it, the whole phone call part of it, is different than any kind of CPA marketing out there too. And also, the outbound side, that's kind of making a comeback. There's solutions out there for something old-school, right? Something we all know about, outbound dialing. It's not nothing new. But there's some new technology out there that makes it really easy and efficient, and that's starting to come into play a lot more in the Pay Per Call space too.

Adam Young:
What are some of the benefits of working with the Pay Per Call network as opposed to trying to go direct, say, to all these different call centers?

Eric Evans:
Sure. Yeah. I mean, especially if you don't have your own tracking platform setup and also you don't want to deal with a lot of back end clients, we make it easy for everybody. I mean, that's really what value we bring to the table is we have everything set up. Some of our campaigns have dozens of buyers on the back end. These very complicated schemas of budgets, and concurrency caps, and states, and call center hours, and this whole web we have to weave together to make a successful campaign. For publishers not having to deal with all that and just basically saying, "Here's a phone number. We'll pay you this per call," you don't have to deal with any of that. If advertisers are complaining about your traffic, we deal with it. We keep people happy, you know what I mean? I like to say it takes two to tango and we keep everybody dancing. A lot of times if these advertisers and publishers were working directly together these deals would fall through. We've become very good at navigating how to keep everybody happy.

Adam Young:
That's a really important distinction to make between Pay Per Call and CPA. There's a lot more to manage on the back end. It's not just simply how much cap you have for your Nutra campaign. You literally have to line up inbound calls with humans to answer those calls and all sorts of different criteria or licensing. Like Eric just mentioned, the states a lot of insurance agents have to be licensed to take calls in different states, and they have to manage all of that on the back end. So there's significant advantages to working with a network instead of going direct in Pay Per Call over any other type of CPA. What do you think some of the biggest opportunities in Pay Per Call are right now for new players and old players alike?

Eric Evans:
Off the top of my head, I'd say I guess bridging data with Pay Per Call. Like I said, this outbound dialing stuff. There's a lot of opportunity. And also that kind of helps with consistency, right? So as boring as this sounds, learning about the TCBA laws so you don't get yourself in trouble. But basically getting leads, and getting them on the phone, and transferring those calls all through automated processes is really a big trend right now. And there's always new verticals that are popping up. It's hard to get into something that's really saturated, like an auto insurance or something like that, where there's just tons of competition. It seems really obvious, but sometimes things come my way that are sort of out of the box that you don't think will work well, and then all of a sudden, it turns into a big thing. We had a campaign running for a while that was passport expediting, right? I would never think that that is something that anyone needs. But there's tons of people that need that every day, and most of those people have questions, right? For Pay Per Call, if it's-- you're never going to put a lawyer in your shopping cart and be like, "You're my lawyer now [laughter]. You know what I mean? It's like you've got to talk to people. So there's definitely verticals where this is still new. It's only been around a few years. And so I see people out there developing their own verticals almost, which is really exciting bringing something new to the table. And we've tried to do some of that stuff too. Create different bundles or things where you can market for something more general, but then have a bunch of specific buyers' kind of underneath, and create a tree where every call is going to go to the right person. So yeah, just be creative.

Adam Young:
The great thing about Pay Per Call too is you actually get call recordings. You can listen to what these people are talking about and understand their intent and how the campaign works. And even better, unlike CPA, there's no scrubbing. You can't scrub a phone call and pretend like it didn't happen. There's a recording of it. And so affiliates are treated very fairly in the Pay Per Call space, which is something I like a lot with my CPA background. We're always worried about who's stealing and scrubbing our campaigns, but in Pay Per Call that doesn't really exist. As far as those verticals go though, what do you see really growing over the next year or two?

Eric Evans:
I see a lot of growth in the senior space. The Baby Boomers are all turning 65 now. And there's a lot to be done with various Medicare-related offers, which can span a number of different things. Everything from a reverse mortgage, to supplement insurance. and everything that would go with that. And those people make phone calls still, you know what I mean? Younger people, obviously, they still make a ton of phone calls, whether they think they're these cool millennials who never make phone calls, they still make a lot of phone calls. But older people specifically are going to be more open and apt to making a phone call. So for the Pay Per Call space, there's a lot of money to be made in the senior space. For whatever specific thing you want to target within that, I think that's a new gold rush, I think [laughter].

Adam Young:
Until they die [laughter]. Take advantage of the Baby Boomers while they're breathing, so you have that 10 or 20 percent working on other campaigns [laughter].

Eric Evans:
Yep. Nailed it.

Adam Young:
What does the future hold for HyperTarget Marketing? What are some of the big projects and pushes that you guys are working on right now?

Eric Evans:
Yeah. We are in the senior space. We're growing a lot there. We've been busy building a lot of our own offers. Our goal is to provide as much value as we can to our publishers and have something unique for our advertisers. And really make unique campaigns that hopefully perform better than what's out there. So we've been focused a lot on building some offers now and using our technology on the back end to get these people on the phone so that we can kind of bridge the gap a little bit between traditional lead generation and CPA stuff and Pay Per Call. So that's something I'm really excited about. And just meeting people. I feel like everyone that comes and works with us stays with us. People really enjoy working with us. We take care of our clients. We take care of our publishers. We started off as publishers. We know what publishers are looking for. I mean, I'm one of the first Pay Per Call publishers ever other than some jokers that are doing a crappy job out there, this guy Anthony Pulizzi is always giving problems, but--

Adam Young:
Oh, wow [laughter]. [crosstalk] [laughter].

Eric Evans:
But work with HyperTarget, so [laughter].

Adam Young:
We are not cutting that Eric [crosstalk] [laughter]. Well, thank you so much for joining us today. This was an amazing call. How can people get a hold of HyperTarget Marketing if they want to do business with you guys?

Eric Evans:
Our websites the easiest place to start. HyperTargetMarketing.com, all one word. We're here in Santa Monica. You're welcome to come visit us at the office. We're at all the trade shows. I mean, we're usually at Affiliate Summit exhibiting. At LeadsCon. If you're going to LeadsCon in Boston, they're calling it Connect to Convert. It's the first show they're having in Boston. We're throwing a big party called ‘CALLS CALLS CALLS’ for everyone involved in Pay Per Call. You can just go to the website, CallsCallsCalls.com. If you're going to make it to that show, we'd love to have you there too.

Adam Young:
Amazing. Well, Thank you so much for your time. We appreciate you being on the show.

Eric Evans:
Yeah. Thanks, Adam.


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Thanks for checking out the Pay Per Callers Show! Let us know what you think by joining the conversation and leaving us comment. If you liked this episode, leave us a like and be sure to subscribe to make sure you never miss an episode!

This episode of Pay Per Callers is brought to you by Ringba Call Tracking and Analytics. See how Ringba is inventing the future of calls at Ringba.com.
 
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#4
Hi Adam,
Case study with different traffic source would be very much helpful for us like pop ads, Mobile push Notification, google banner ads etc.
Also a short tutorial video how Call tracking works

Thanks
 

Adam

Administrator
Staff member
#5
Hi Adam,
Case study with different traffic source would be very much helpful for us like pop ads, Mobile push Notification, google banner ads etc.
Also a short tutorial video how Call tracking works

Thanks
Thanks for the feedback. We've received other similar requests for training and tutorials. Give us a week or two to see what we can come up with for you and the community.
 
#6
Major challenge in Pay Per Call is getting approved by Affiliate Networks If you are new..I can share my experience..I am in SEO and Facebook Marketing for last 2 years... learned Google PPC..Applied couple of networks..Only got approved by Thinkcalls ..but currently, they have paused every campaign..Did not hear a positive response from Hypertarget..Probably they don't allow new publishers..
 
#7
Major challenge in Pay Per Call is getting approved by Affiliate Networks If you are new..I can share my experience..I am in SEO and Facebook Marketing for last 2 years... learned Google PPC..Applied couple of networks..Only got approved by Thinkcalls ..but currently, they have paused every campaign..Did not hear a positive response from Hypertarget..Probably they don't allow new publishers..
Hi there, If you are experience in PPC and can generate quality calls for them, then any networks will approved you. Quality is the most Important thing here. Be honest, tell them your call source your traffic methods etc. they will approved you. networks need good publishers, more calls
 
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