Click to Call (CTCall) and Pay Per Call (PPCall) are often used interchangeably when they are in fact, quite different.

Pay Per Call (often called PPCall) is similar to PPC (Pay Per Click) except that instead of bidding for clicks to your website, one is bidding for calls. This is a fairly generic term that is used to describe the entire industry of buying phone calls.

The most common form of pay per call is displaying a trackable phone number on a webpage (or search result) and then when a searcher calls the number, the advertiser pays the inventory provider. Often the inventory provider is showing phone calls based upon an open bidding environment - the same way PPClick works.

Click to call is a technology that is used within PPCall. Basically, when one comes across a click to call ad, the searcher will see an open text box for their phone number. When one inputs their phone number into the box and hits ‘connect’ the technology starts to work. Behind the scenes is some telco tech that calls the searcher, calls the advertiser, and then connects the two lines together so they can speak with each other.

Similar to the old geometry adage ‘A rectangle is a square, but a square is not a rectangle’; so is ‘Click to call is PPCall but PPCall isn’t click to call’.

• AOL launches Pay Per Call
• Superpages Launches Pay Per Call
• Google Testing Click to Call
• Verizon Offers Pay Per Call Solution
• Yahoo ads PPCall