If you've been attending or following the discussions at the recent Affiliate Summit conferences, you'll know that there's a lot of buzz around pay per call. Many affiliates are comfortably making six figures in a day in this area. The businesses, direct advertisers, and affiliate networks in this space are also making anywhere from eight to nine figures in revenue each year. This trend shows that pay per call is one of the most promising areas for affiliate marketers in 2024.
So today, we want to introduce this space to affiliates who are new to it. We'll show you how to successfully launch and scale your pay per call campaigns. From choosing the right type of business to setting up your call tracking software, we'll cover all the important parts to help you understand this exciting industry.
The opportunity in pay per call
Phone calls have the highest level of intent compared to other forms of advertising. When people take the time to pick up the phone and call a business, it indicates they are serious about purchasing a product or service. Customers who call want to buy immediately, making them the most valuable type of lead for businesses.
Consequently, businesses are more likely to close new clients when they receive phone calls, resulting in the highest return on investment for everyone involved in the pay per call ecosystem.
Why phone calls are a big deal
Phone calls are particularly important for complex or urgent purchases that require human interaction. When consumers need immediate assistance or have questions about a product or service, they often resort to calling. Additionally, phone calls are more common for big-ticket items, such as mortgages, auto sales, or insurance policies, as these purchases involve a significant financial commitment and may require personalized guidance.
The high-value nature of phone leads means that businesses in these industries are willing to allocate substantial advertising budgets to acquire more calls. This creates a massive opportunity for affiliates and networks to capitalize on the pay per call market. Moreover, the sustainability and longevity of pay per call campaigns make them an attractive option for building a valuable, long-term business that can potentially be acquired in the future.
Pay Per Call vs. Outbound dialing for dollars
Pay per call advertising differs significantly from outbound dialing for dollars, where call center agents cold call potential customers. Outbound dialing can be inefficient and demoralizing for sales agents, as they often encounter uninterested or hostile individuals. In contrast, pay per call leads are 100% inbound, meaning the caller is already interested in the product or service. This results in a more enjoyable and productive experience for sales agents, as they can focus on closing deals with qualified leads.
Inbound calls also have no TCPA (Telephone Consumer Protection Act) requirements, allowing call centers to operate 24/7 without worrying about compliance issues. Additionally, pay per call offers a predictable cost per acquisition at scale, making it easier for businesses to budget and plan their marketing efforts.
Pay Per Call vs. Traditional CPA Affiliate Marketing
Pay per call advertising offers several advantages over traditional CPA (cost per action) affiliate marketing. First and foremost, pay per call campaigns are more sustainable and less susceptible to copycats. Since human agents are required to handle the calls, there is a natural barrier to entry that prevents competitors from easily replicating successful campaigns.
Also, pay per call campaigns are fully whitehat and are not based on tricks or deceptive tactics, such as ad cloaking or shady practices. Instead, they focus on connecting genuinely interested consumers with the products and services they need. This approach reduces the risk of being kicked off ad networks or facing compliance issues.
However, succeeding in pay per call requires more effort and the use of specialized technology, such as call tracking software like Ringba. Affiliates transitioning from traditional CPA marketing will need to adapt to working with call centers and building buyer networks. Despite the initial learning curve, pay per call offers the potential to build a valuable, scalable business with higher profit margins compared to other forms of affiliate marketing.
Pay Per Call explained
Pay Per Call is an advertising model that allows businesses to buy inbound phone calls from consumers who are interested in their products and services. This model shifts the cost of acquisition risk from the advertiser (the company that needs customers) to the Pay Per Call network, which can be a broker, or directly to the affiliates (promoters) of their offer.
This allows the advertiser or business to predict their cost of acquisition and stabilize their marketing activities while providing a unique opportunity for brokers and affiliates to create large amounts of profit by leveraging their marketing abilities.
Pay Per Call creates a win-win situation for everyone involved. Phone calls carry the highest intent of any consumer action, as people only call when they're genuinely interested in the product or service and are often ready to make a purchase.
For instance, if a company buying phone calls is paying ten dollars per call and has an average close ratio of 25%, they know their cost of acquiring a customer is approximately $40 every single time. This predictability allows businesses to focus on running their operations while leaving the marketing and user acquisition to their partners.
The fixed cost of a call also creates a massive opportunity for skilled marketers to come up with innovative ways to promote the campaign. Since the advertiser is unaware of the affiliate or broker's profit margin, once a successful campaign is designed and running, the promoters can reap the benefits for as long as the advertiser is willing to buy the calls or as long as the campaign lasts.
Example pay per call flow from start to finish
Let's examine a simple Pay Per Call flow from start to finish to understand the consumer's journey and what happens at each step. Here's a visual representation of a simple, standard Pay Per Call campaign flow:
- The network creates an offer, finding advertisers or buyers for their phone calls.
- The offer is presented to the publisher or affiliate.
- The affiliate receives a tracking number from the network and routes it through their own call tracking platform (e.g., Ringba).
- The affiliate places their tracking number on a mobile advertisement.
- A consumer searches for a relevant term, sees the ad, and clicks to call.
- An inbound call is generated through the affiliate's tracking number, which routes to the Pay Per Call network and eventually to the buyer’s call centre.
- The buyer qualifies the customer, and if the call meets all payout criteria, such as geographic location, demographic information, call duration, and IVR choices, they issue a payout to the network.
- The network then issues the agreed-upon commission to the affiliate
How to get started with running Pay Per Call campaigns as an affiliate
1. Choosing your vertical
The first step in getting started with pay per call is deciding what you want to advertise. There are many verticals to choose from, such as:
- Financial services: Mortgages, loans, debt consolidation, and credit repair
- Insurance: Auto, home, life, and health insurance
- Home services: Plumbing, HVAC, roofing, and locksmith services
- Legal services: Personal injury, bankruptcy, and criminal defense
- Health and wellness: Addiction treatment, dental services, and medical supplies
The reality is, any of these verticals can work - it just depends on your willingness to focus on building a business in that space. There's no single "best" vertical to start with. Pick one that resonates with you and that you're willing to put in the work on.
One of the great things about pay per call compared to other models like dropshipping or SEO is that you can build your business by developing good relationships and doing quality work. With pay per call, you get full transparency into exactly what is happening with the calls you generate. This is different from selling leads, where buyers may give inconsistent feedback. In pay per call, you can literally hear and see in real-time how the calls are being handled.
2. Finding Offers
Once you've chosen your vertical, the next step is finding pay per call offers to promote. One of the best places to do this is a site called Offer Vault. You can search their directory to find pay per call offers across all kinds of verticals.
Another option is to look for affiliate networks that have pay per call offers. Several networks are now offering these, so they aren't too difficult to find. Partnerkin has simplified this for you as we already have a curated list of the best pay per call affiliate networks. You can check it out here:
However, when getting started we recommend that you test out multiple offers from different buyers or affiliate networks before determining which ones consistently answer the phone, give you the best price points, and are easy to work with when call volume fluctuates.
All of these factors can have a big impact not just on your business, but your mental well-being as you navigate the ups and downs.
While online research is helpful, one of the best ways to find good pay per call offers is by getting out from behind your computer and meeting people in the real world. Attend industry trade shows and conferences like, Affiliate World, LeadsCon, and Affiliate Summit.
At these events, you'll meet other affiliates doing pay per call, as well as the networks and direct advertisers you can sell calls to. Building in-person relationships is the most impactful thing for success in this industry.
3. Building your landing pages
The second major piece you need after finding an offer to run, is a simple 2-4 step landing page or website to drive your traffic to. There are a number of tools you can use to build this, such as:
- Lead Pages
- Webflow
- Custom HTML (if you can code yourself or hire a developer)
All of these options can work, it just depends on your technical skill level and needs. For example, custom HTML will give the fastest loading speeds and most flexibility, but requires coding knowledge. On the other hand, a tool like Lead Pages is very user-friendly but will be slower and less customizable.
Choosing a call tracking platform
Once you have your offer selected and landing page built, you need a call tracking platform to manage your campaigns. The go-to software in the pay per call space is Ringba.
Ringba allows you to track every aspect of your call campaigns and route calls to buyers based on their performance. This is crucial, because as an affiliate, the success of your campaigns is heavily dependent on the buyers you sell calls to. Not all buyers are equal in their ability to answer the phone and close sales.
With Ringba, you can get full transparency into how each buyer is monetizing the calls you send, allowing you to identify issues and make adjustments as needed. It's a powerful tool that has completely changed the landscape of pay per call.
4. Developing creatives
Before you can start running traffic, you need to develop the creatives - the images and videos you'll be using in your ads.
Generally, you want to start by testing 5-10 different concepts or variations. For each concept, create multiple versions with slight differences. For example, if you're testing an image ad, take the base version and create duplicates with different background colors like purple, green, blue, etc.
This allows you to split test how color impacts performance without needing to create entirely new designs from scratch. While this kind of granular testing won't turn an unprofitable campaign into a home run, it could reduce your traffic costs by 30% - which might be just enough to make the campaign profitable.
5. Launching your ads
When it comes to actually launching your pay per call campaigns, there are four main traffic sources you can start with:
- Facebook Ads
- Native Ads
- Search Ads
- YouTube Ads
However, as of 2024, the ones we can recommend are Facebook and YouTube Ads.
Facebook tends to be more user-friendly, but has been a bit volatile recently. YouTube is extremely powerful for scaling pay per call, but has a steeper learning curve. Most super affiliates doing high call volumes are using YouTube heavily.
Using either of these platforms, you can now start driving traffic to your landing pages and generating calls. But the real work is just beginning. From here, you enter into a cycle of monitoring performance, managing margins, optimizing creatives and landing pages, finding new buyers, and constantly repeating.
Maximizing your profits
To succeed in pay per call, you need to dedicate regular time and attention to all of these areas. When you're spending large budgets, that may mean checking on stats every few minutes to stay on top of performance.
At the same time, you need to continuously be trying to improve what you can control - your ads, landing pages, and buyers. The goal is to steadily work your cost per call down while simultaneously maintaining high quality and managing your network of buyers.
This is where the transparency of pay per call really shines. Unlike other models where you just see aggregate data, in pay per call you get insights into every step of the process. You can identify when certain buyers are underperforming or not following through properly, and make adjustments.
For example with lead generation, it's not uncommon to have buyers who simply don't follow up leads enough times, or fail to close sales. In pay per call, that becomes your problem because it tanks your margins. But the data allows from the pay per call trackers allows you to spot these issues and either coach the buyer to improve or replace them.
Challenges in pay per call
As you scale your pay per call business, there are a number of challenges you're likely to encounter. For example:
- Buyers not answering calls, resulting in short duration calls that you can't bill for
- Getting calls from states your buyers aren't licensed in due to imprecise targeting options on ad platforms
- Generating calls outside your buyers' business hours based on ad delivery
- Having traffic caps reduced or paused by your buyers without warning
- Website or phone number outages
- Ads or landing pages with messages that are too aggressive/misleading, resulting in low quality calls
- Experiencing bad performance from typically good buyers
When you encounter these problems, it's important to drill down into your data to identify the root causes. If you're not watching your stats regularly, a single issue like a key buyer getting capped can quickly turn your profitable campaign upside down.
Another common issue is when aggressive ads or landing pages cause a mismatch between what the caller expects and what the buyer can actually provide. You may get cheaper leads this way, but they won't convert. The best approach is usually to have your ad be more aggressive to get affordable clicks, but then have the landing page properly qualify and set expectations.
Insights from Adam Young, the CEO and co-founder of Ringba
To get more context on the Pay Per Call space, we are going to share insights from Adam Young in a Q&A format. Adam is a former super affiliate and now the CEO and co-founder of Ringba – the top rated Pay Per Call tracking software.
Q: What inspired you to found Ringba and enter the Pay Per Call space?
A: My business partner Harrison and I were affiliates doing 8-figures a year with a small team. One day, our click traffic campaigns suddenly stopped and disappeared. I realized we had spent years building a business but created nothing permanent or sellable.
That's when we saw the need to build sustainable technology and opportunities for the industry. We quickly learned that inbound calls were the future, because the consumer, affiliate, and advertiser all win. Inbound calls provide a great consumer experience and are supported by regulators, unlike outbound dialing.
So we decided to build Ringba to empower affiliates with the technology to control the full value chain and create proprietary results through inbound calls. Our mission became helping affiliates succeed and grow the Pay Per Call industry.
Q: What makes Pay Per Call such an exciting vertical for affiliates right now?
A: Pay Per Call is exciting because it's a win-win-win model. The consumer only calls when they are truly interested in buying, so the experience is great for them. Affiliates can generate high-quality leads and control the full process. And advertisers, often large established companies, get customers who are ready to purchase.
What's rare in affiliate marketing is Pay Per Call offers incredible sustainability. The businesses buying calls are investing hundreds of millions in infrastructure - they aren't going away. Products like insurance, home services, and auto services will always be needed. A phone call lead is also extremely valuable as you can analyze exactly what happened.
Regulations are also favoring inbound calls over outbound dialing that consumers dislike. And technology is putting affiliates in the driver's seat to work with multiple buyers and build proprietary value.
We're seeing affiliates build highly profitable businesses that are sellable for $50-100M+, which is almost unheard of in affiliate marketing. The space is already driving billions in revenue, but it's still very early days with massive growth ahead. It's a generational opportunity for affiliates who are willing to put in the work.
Q: What advantages do you think Ringba offers compared to competitors in the space?
A: I believe it starts with the fact that Harrison and I are the only tech platform owners who were actual media buyers and affiliates for over a decade. We intimately understand affiliate marketing and what affiliates need to succeed.
We're willing to invest more than anyone else in support, hiring large teams of software developers to service clients. Our values are centered around how we serve customers and the industry, not just profits.
Ringba also innovates with technology that becomes industry standard, like inventing PING Post for selling calls, building the first SaaS ring trees, and pioneering programmatic call buying adopted by companies like Progressive Insurance.
Our north star is helping clients 10X their businesses. Every Ringba employee is focused on making our clients successful and lifting up the whole industry. I think that mission-driven approach is why we've been able to dominate and drive the Pay Per Call space forward.
Q: What advice would you give to an affiliate just starting out in Pay Per Call today?
A: First, read my book The Pay Per Call Revolution to understand the industry, how to get started, scale, and avoid pitfalls. Then get a platform like Ringba to actually control your data and be competitive.
I would look for untapped opportunities and consumer groups where others aren't - try marketing channels beyond just Google/Facebook that allow a phone number, like direct mail, radio ads, TV, yard signs. Go after demographics others ignore.
Consider a model of driving general cheaper leads to your own call center to qualify and transfer them. Control the full value chain vs just running traffic to someone else's number.
Most importantly, be willing to really put in the work - listen to thousands of calls to gain insights, do thousands of ad variations and landing page tests. The top affiliates making 8-9 figures are masters at using tech and data to optimize every step.
Focus on providing the best consumer experience and real value to your advertiser partners. Building a sustainable business that consumers and partners love is how affiliates are selling companies for $50-100M+ in this space, not with short-term churn and burn tactics.
Q: In your opinion, what type of affiliate has the biggest advantage starting out in Pay Per Call today - the creative person, tech person, or business development person?
A: The ideal is someone who can combine all three skill sets - business development skills to build advertiser relationships, tech skills to leverage platforms and data, and creative skills to generate the right marketing and consumer experience.
But I believe it evolves based on your stage and scale. When starting out, incredible creative ability to get low CPAs is most important. Then tech skills to optimize become crucial for margins and growth. Finally at the highest levels, business development and team building are essential.
The top affiliates I see invest in people across creative, tech and business development. But the most successful ones are guided by a real focus on the end consumer experience and their partners' goals. Putting that above short-term profits is what generates businesses worth hundreds of millions.
Closing thoughts
Pay per call is an incredibly powerful business model for affiliates who are willing to put in the work. The ability to see exactly what's happening at every stage and build real relationships is a game changer.
But succeeding over the long run requires constant attention and optimization. Your best buyers will still have off days that can tank your margins if you aren't watching. At higher spends, you may need to be checking stats every few minutes to stay profitable.
If you're willing to grind through the challenges, the rewards can be immense. While there's no single "secret" to pay per call success, following the steps laid out here will help you start generating profitable call campaigns as quickly as possible.
The key things to remember:
- Pick a vertical and stick with it
- Find offers by using directories, networks, and attending industry events
- Build a smart landing page that matches your traffic source
- Use Ringba to track your campaigns and optimize your buyers
- Split test your creatives to improve your cost per call
- Launch on Facebook and/or YouTube to start generating calls
- Obsessively monitor your campaigns as you scale
- Don't be afraid to coach or cut off underperforming buyers
I hope this guide has given you a solid roadmap to getting started in pay per call. If you're looking for more tips and strategies, we recommend you to buy the book by Adam Young called The Pay Per Call Revolution.
