Find out how Real Time Bidding for Inbound Phone Calls works and what it means for the future of Pay Per Call.
Lesson Transcript
Hey, Pay Per Callers, we're going to talk about Real Time Bidding for Phone Calls.
What is Real-Time Bidding for Phone Calls
Now the world's largest buyers of phone calls buy them programmatically, and that means they're using computers to make decisions on which calls they're going to buy, how much they're going to pay for them, and where their calls are going to go.
So, Ringba is a very unique platform, because it's the only platform that you can run an entire Pay Per Call Network on, run an entire call buy or business on, and automatically integrate with all of those world's biggest buyers of calls so that you can also sell your calls programmatically.
Now if you had to do this on your own, like companies had to do in the past, they would have to go invest millions of dollars into their own real time bidding infrastructure so that they could do this. But we did that. We invested the money for you, and you can now power an entire real time bidding network for phone calls using the Ringba platform.
How Real Time Bidding for Calls Works
Now, here is how real time bidding for phone calls works conceptually. So, a caller calls, they pick up the phone, and Ringba pings out to all of your programmatic buyers. And so, we send information about that phone call, demographic information, metadata about the call, maybe the geographic location of the caller, category of the phone call. Whatever information that the buyer wants we map it, and then in real time when the phone rings we send that information to your buyers.
Now, those buyers review all of that information programmatically. There are no humans involved here. And in less than a second they return a bid, the duration of the phone call they require to pay that bid, if it's a duration based campaign, the destination phone number sometimes, if it's a dynamic routing situation where they issue dynamic phone numbers to route the phone calls to, and, potentially, other information that's required for our platform to properly route that phone call.
Then Ringba collects all of the bids, we determine who we should sell the call to, and predict what's going to have the highest return on investment for you, and then the call is routed to that destination before they even know what happens. This literally all happens before the phone rings, before the caller even knows that the call is being connected to a buyer. So, most of this happens, including all the pings, and posts, and routing decisions, in a couple of hundred milliseconds. So, always less than a second.
RTB for Phone Calls Flow
And here's what a call flow looks like when you're dealing with real time bidding for calls, or are in a ping tree environment, which is a ping post environment if you're coming from the lead gen space. So, a phone call comes in, it hits Ringba's platform, and Ringba pings out to all the buyers. Now, it could be one buyer, it could be three buyers, it could 3000 buyers it doesn't matter.
Our CTO comes from the RTB space. He was the former CTO of one of the world's largest ad networks. Our engineering team knows how to handle pings at massive scale in a RTB environment. And so, no matter how big of a ping network you build, and how many buyers you plug into it we can automatically scale to handle that capacity. It is not an issue.
And so, in this example here we have three buyers.
The first buyer returns a bid of 25 dollars, and a minimum duration of one minute. And so, that means that the buyer will pay 25 dollars for the phone call regardless of what category, or what type of call it is. They're going to make a bid on it with all of that information we send them. And then once that call hits one minute, after it's been connected to the buyer, they will pay for it. Buyer two returned a bid of 20 dollars, and a duration of one minute and 30 seconds. And ping buyer number three returned a bid of 18 dollars, and a duration of two minutes. And so, obviously, the first buyer they had the best bid. You're going to make the most money if they call goes to them, so they win. And then Ringba routes that call to buyer number one.
Now, if you're using our RTB for calls infrastructure all of the other types of routing plans come into play here as well. So, if ping buyer number one doesn't answer the phone call, or the call dropped, or there's a busy signal we're going to automatically go through this process again, and route it to a different buyer whether they're a ping buyer, or in a normal routing plan. We're not going to let that phone call die.
So, everything that you're used to with our standard routing also applies when you add a ping tree into the fold so that you can maximize the amount of money that you're getting on every single phone call.
How Call Routing Works with Real Time Bidding
Now, let's take a look at what this actually looks like when you're dealing with a ping tree, and static buyers. And so, by static buyer I mean maybe you have a direct relationship with a call center buyer that's paying you a flat rate per phone call.
In this example we'll say that buyer one is a call center, and they pay 10 dollars per phone call on a minute 30 duration. Then we're going to say that static buyer number two is a Pay Per Call Network, and they're going to pay you 11 dollars per call, but only after a two minute duration. Okay?
And so, when you set up your call tracking campaign for this, and you add a ping tree into the fold we're going to ping all your buyers, before we decide where the phone call goes, to make sure that you get the maximum amount of money whether you're dealing with static buyers, Pay Per Call Networks, or programmatic buyers all in the same routing plan.
So, let's run through this form start to finish:
You're a publisher, or you generate the phone call through one of our tracking numbers. Obviously, the consumer sees your ad, they pick up the phone, they dial, it hits Ringba. Ringba takes a look at this and sees that you have programmatic buyers and static buyers configured for this campaign. So, before the decision is made we ping out to all your buyers, and they return bids for that phone call just like display advertising. Okay?
And so, this is really exciting, because display advertising's about 10 years ahead of calls, and we're starting to see a transition to programmatic calls, and that's going to create some really amazing opportunities for everybody. And so, that's why I'm so excited about this.
Basically, again, it pings out to all your buyers that are in the ping tree. Buyer one returns a bid of eight dollars with a one minute duration, buyer two returns a bid of 10 dollars with a one minute and 30 second duration, and buyer three pings back with a bid of 12 dollars for a one minute 30 second duration.
Now, we're also going to take a look at your static buyers then once all of the bids are in we're going to predict which buyer is actually going to have the highest likelihood of converting for you. Which ones going to make you the most amount of money? Whether it's on a raw call, or a duration based one; all these things. We're actually going to score all of your buyers to see which one has the highest probability of yielding a conversion, and we're going to take that into account when Ringba makes its decision on where your calls going to go so that you receive the maximum amount of money for that call.
In this scenario ping buyer three is the obvious winner, because they bid significantly more than everybody else, and has a reasonable duration.
Ping buyer one, we don't know exactly what the decision making looked like, but it has a shorter duration so a higher probability of conversion. And so, what we do is we figure out the estimated earnings per call based on previous behavior of all these buyers, and then we decide which one is going to make the most amount of money for you.
This is a very sophisticated and complicated process, but once you're able to integrate with all these call buyers that do it programmatically what you're going to start to see is a drastic lift in the amount of money that you can make per call. But you're also going to be able to sell calls in thousands of different categories and verticals, because those categories don't typically show up on Pay Per Call Networks because they don't have the manpower to manage thousands of different categories. And most Pay Per Call Networks out there, that aren't using Ringba, simply don't have the technology available for them to manage this many categories. There's no ping tree in any of these other platforms out there that Pay Per Call Networks are using. So, they're at a significant disadvantage when compared to a Ringba customer because the world's largest buyers of calls do it this way.
Again, the reason they do it this way is so that they can manage call flows across thousands of different verticals without having any humans in the process, and that means everyone makes more money, and it creates a lot of opportunities for anyone involved.
If you're a Ringba customer and you’re watching this, make sure you talk to your account managers. They're going to be able to fast track you in to all these programmatic buyers that, again, are the biggest in the world. We can open up massive opportunities for you that none of our competitors can simply because we have better technology, and really good relationships with all the programmatic buyers with calls. Seriously, talk to your account managers they'll help you out.
If you'd like more information about how this works please see our training videos. They'll walk you through how to configure your ping tree, and do all of that type of stuff.
Now, if you’re in the Pay Per Call space right now, and you're NOT working with programmatic buyers, I highly recommend you do it because this is the direction that they industry is actually heading in. And right now if you get into the programmatic space for calls you're on the forefront of it. So, you're going to be faster in the market. You're going to be closer up on the adoption curve to where people make the most money with it before everyone realizes that if they're not in programmatic calls they're basically screwed if they want to build a really big business in the call space.
I highly recommend that you understand how this works, what it does, and start to look at programmatic call buying and selling as the future of your business, 'cause I passionately believe that this is where the industry is going. And we definitely put our money where our mouth is 'cause we spent millions of dollars building flexible programmatic call buying and selling infrastructure for our clients. Check it out. You can make a lot of money with this stuff.
----
Previous Lesson | Next Lesson: How Pay Per Call Networks Function
Lesson Transcript
Hey, Pay Per Callers, we're going to talk about Real Time Bidding for Phone Calls.
What is Real-Time Bidding for Phone Calls
Now the world's largest buyers of phone calls buy them programmatically, and that means they're using computers to make decisions on which calls they're going to buy, how much they're going to pay for them, and where their calls are going to go.
So, Ringba is a very unique platform, because it's the only platform that you can run an entire Pay Per Call Network on, run an entire call buy or business on, and automatically integrate with all of those world's biggest buyers of calls so that you can also sell your calls programmatically.
Now if you had to do this on your own, like companies had to do in the past, they would have to go invest millions of dollars into their own real time bidding infrastructure so that they could do this. But we did that. We invested the money for you, and you can now power an entire real time bidding network for phone calls using the Ringba platform.
How Real Time Bidding for Calls Works
Now, here is how real time bidding for phone calls works conceptually. So, a caller calls, they pick up the phone, and Ringba pings out to all of your programmatic buyers. And so, we send information about that phone call, demographic information, metadata about the call, maybe the geographic location of the caller, category of the phone call. Whatever information that the buyer wants we map it, and then in real time when the phone rings we send that information to your buyers.
Now, those buyers review all of that information programmatically. There are no humans involved here. And in less than a second they return a bid, the duration of the phone call they require to pay that bid, if it's a duration based campaign, the destination phone number sometimes, if it's a dynamic routing situation where they issue dynamic phone numbers to route the phone calls to, and, potentially, other information that's required for our platform to properly route that phone call.
Then Ringba collects all of the bids, we determine who we should sell the call to, and predict what's going to have the highest return on investment for you, and then the call is routed to that destination before they even know what happens. This literally all happens before the phone rings, before the caller even knows that the call is being connected to a buyer. So, most of this happens, including all the pings, and posts, and routing decisions, in a couple of hundred milliseconds. So, always less than a second.
RTB for Phone Calls Flow
And here's what a call flow looks like when you're dealing with real time bidding for calls, or are in a ping tree environment, which is a ping post environment if you're coming from the lead gen space. So, a phone call comes in, it hits Ringba's platform, and Ringba pings out to all the buyers. Now, it could be one buyer, it could be three buyers, it could 3000 buyers it doesn't matter.
Our CTO comes from the RTB space. He was the former CTO of one of the world's largest ad networks. Our engineering team knows how to handle pings at massive scale in a RTB environment. And so, no matter how big of a ping network you build, and how many buyers you plug into it we can automatically scale to handle that capacity. It is not an issue.
And so, in this example here we have three buyers.
The first buyer returns a bid of 25 dollars, and a minimum duration of one minute. And so, that means that the buyer will pay 25 dollars for the phone call regardless of what category, or what type of call it is. They're going to make a bid on it with all of that information we send them. And then once that call hits one minute, after it's been connected to the buyer, they will pay for it. Buyer two returned a bid of 20 dollars, and a duration of one minute and 30 seconds. And ping buyer number three returned a bid of 18 dollars, and a duration of two minutes. And so, obviously, the first buyer they had the best bid. You're going to make the most money if they call goes to them, so they win. And then Ringba routes that call to buyer number one.
Now, if you're using our RTB for calls infrastructure all of the other types of routing plans come into play here as well. So, if ping buyer number one doesn't answer the phone call, or the call dropped, or there's a busy signal we're going to automatically go through this process again, and route it to a different buyer whether they're a ping buyer, or in a normal routing plan. We're not going to let that phone call die.
So, everything that you're used to with our standard routing also applies when you add a ping tree into the fold so that you can maximize the amount of money that you're getting on every single phone call.
How Call Routing Works with Real Time Bidding
Now, let's take a look at what this actually looks like when you're dealing with a ping tree, and static buyers. And so, by static buyer I mean maybe you have a direct relationship with a call center buyer that's paying you a flat rate per phone call.
In this example we'll say that buyer one is a call center, and they pay 10 dollars per phone call on a minute 30 duration. Then we're going to say that static buyer number two is a Pay Per Call Network, and they're going to pay you 11 dollars per call, but only after a two minute duration. Okay?
And so, when you set up your call tracking campaign for this, and you add a ping tree into the fold we're going to ping all your buyers, before we decide where the phone call goes, to make sure that you get the maximum amount of money whether you're dealing with static buyers, Pay Per Call Networks, or programmatic buyers all in the same routing plan.
So, let's run through this form start to finish:
You're a publisher, or you generate the phone call through one of our tracking numbers. Obviously, the consumer sees your ad, they pick up the phone, they dial, it hits Ringba. Ringba takes a look at this and sees that you have programmatic buyers and static buyers configured for this campaign. So, before the decision is made we ping out to all your buyers, and they return bids for that phone call just like display advertising. Okay?
And so, this is really exciting, because display advertising's about 10 years ahead of calls, and we're starting to see a transition to programmatic calls, and that's going to create some really amazing opportunities for everybody. And so, that's why I'm so excited about this.
Basically, again, it pings out to all your buyers that are in the ping tree. Buyer one returns a bid of eight dollars with a one minute duration, buyer two returns a bid of 10 dollars with a one minute and 30 second duration, and buyer three pings back with a bid of 12 dollars for a one minute 30 second duration.
Now, we're also going to take a look at your static buyers then once all of the bids are in we're going to predict which buyer is actually going to have the highest likelihood of converting for you. Which ones going to make you the most amount of money? Whether it's on a raw call, or a duration based one; all these things. We're actually going to score all of your buyers to see which one has the highest probability of yielding a conversion, and we're going to take that into account when Ringba makes its decision on where your calls going to go so that you receive the maximum amount of money for that call.
In this scenario ping buyer three is the obvious winner, because they bid significantly more than everybody else, and has a reasonable duration.
Ping buyer one, we don't know exactly what the decision making looked like, but it has a shorter duration so a higher probability of conversion. And so, what we do is we figure out the estimated earnings per call based on previous behavior of all these buyers, and then we decide which one is going to make the most amount of money for you.
This is a very sophisticated and complicated process, but once you're able to integrate with all these call buyers that do it programmatically what you're going to start to see is a drastic lift in the amount of money that you can make per call. But you're also going to be able to sell calls in thousands of different categories and verticals, because those categories don't typically show up on Pay Per Call Networks because they don't have the manpower to manage thousands of different categories. And most Pay Per Call Networks out there, that aren't using Ringba, simply don't have the technology available for them to manage this many categories. There's no ping tree in any of these other platforms out there that Pay Per Call Networks are using. So, they're at a significant disadvantage when compared to a Ringba customer because the world's largest buyers of calls do it this way.
Again, the reason they do it this way is so that they can manage call flows across thousands of different verticals without having any humans in the process, and that means everyone makes more money, and it creates a lot of opportunities for anyone involved.
If you're a Ringba customer and you’re watching this, make sure you talk to your account managers. They're going to be able to fast track you in to all these programmatic buyers that, again, are the biggest in the world. We can open up massive opportunities for you that none of our competitors can simply because we have better technology, and really good relationships with all the programmatic buyers with calls. Seriously, talk to your account managers they'll help you out.
If you'd like more information about how this works please see our training videos. They'll walk you through how to configure your ping tree, and do all of that type of stuff.
Now, if you’re in the Pay Per Call space right now, and you're NOT working with programmatic buyers, I highly recommend you do it because this is the direction that they industry is actually heading in. And right now if you get into the programmatic space for calls you're on the forefront of it. So, you're going to be faster in the market. You're going to be closer up on the adoption curve to where people make the most money with it before everyone realizes that if they're not in programmatic calls they're basically screwed if they want to build a really big business in the call space.
I highly recommend that you understand how this works, what it does, and start to look at programmatic call buying and selling as the future of your business, 'cause I passionately believe that this is where the industry is going. And we definitely put our money where our mouth is 'cause we spent millions of dollars building flexible programmatic call buying and selling infrastructure for our clients. Check it out. You can make a lot of money with this stuff.
----
Previous Lesson | Next Lesson: How Pay Per Call Networks Function
Last edited: