Key takeaways
- Every statement is the product of four rates: click to call, call to connect, connect to payable, and payable to paid after duplicates and disputes.
- Because they multiply, a small loss at each step compounds. Four steps at eighty percent each leave you with about forty percent.
- Work out your revenue per click, then compare it to your cost per click. That single comparison tells you whether a campaign is worth running.
- Fix the step with the largest absolute loss first, not the one with the worst-looking percentage.
- Track the rates by source and by vertical. A blended average hides the campaign that is quietly funding the losses of another.
The five steps
Between the money you spend and the money you are paid, there are five states a prospect passes through. Naming them is most of the work, because once they are named you can measure each one instead of arguing about the total.
- A click, or an impression on a click-to-call placement. This is what you pay for
- A call initiated. They tapped the number and the call was placed
- A call connected. It actually reached the buyer's line rather than being abandoned, blocked, or dropped
- A payable call. It passed the buffer or established intent sooner, from a covered area, for a covered service
- A paid call. It survived duplicate rules and any dispute, and appears on your statement
The crucial property is that these multiply. If each of the four transitions runs at eighty percent, which sounds healthy at every individual step, you keep about forty percent of what you started with. Publishers who only look at spend and revenue see that forty percent and conclude the vertical does not pay. It usually does. Something in the middle is leaking.
Click to call
How many of the people you paid for actually dialed. This is a targeting and creative measure, and it is the step most under your control.
When it is low, the usual causes are a mismatch between the search or the ad and what the landing experience offers, a phone number that is hard to find or hard to tap on a phone, or an ad that attracted curiosity rather than need. Emergency keywords mixed into the same campaign as research keywords will also drag this down, because half the audience was never going to call anyone today.
Call to connect
How many initiated calls actually reached a buyer. Losses here are mostly mechanical, and mechanical problems are the cheapest kind to fix.
Look at the hour of day first. Calls placed outside buyer hours in your vertical have nowhere to go. Look at abandonment next: callers who hang up in the first few seconds are often reacting to a long IVR step or an unexpected message. And look at geography: a caller in an area with no covering buyer cannot connect, no matter how good the call would have been.
Connect to payable
How many connected calls met the qualification rules. This is the honesty measure of your traffic, and the one buyers care most about.
The buffer does some of the work: 60 seconds in home services, 90 in insurance, financial, medical, travel and telecom, 120 in legal. Intent can make a call payable sooner, but a caller who hangs up in twenty seconds because they were confused about why they dialed will not qualify.
A low rate here almost always traces to creative that overstated something, traffic from outside the covered area, or a source whose audience was not in the market. It is the step where a source that looked cheap reveals its real cost.
Payable to paid
The last shave: duplicates and disputes. A repeat call from the same number within the duplicate window is not paid twice, and a call a buyer successfully disputes comes off the statement.
A few duplicates are normal, especially in emergency verticals where a homeowner calls twice. A lot of duplicates means your media is hitting the same small audience repeatedly, and the fix is frequency capping or a wider audience rather than anything to do with the buyer.
Disputes are the number to watch closely, because they are feedback. A rising dispute rate in one campaign is telling you something specific about that campaign's creative or targeting, well before anyone raises it with you.
Putting it together
Multiply the four rates to get clicks per paid call, then compare revenue per click against cost per click. The arithmetic below uses invented placeholder numbers to show the shape of the calculation. Your own rate per call is set by vertical, geography, and current demand, and your own funnel rates are the ones that matter.
Take a hypothetical campaign: 1,000 clicks. Thirty percent dial, so 300 calls. Eighty-five percent connect, so 255. Sixty percent of those are payable, so 153. After duplicates and disputes you are paid on 145. At a rate of R dollars per call, revenue is 145 times R. Divide by the 1,000 clicks and your revenue per click is about 0.145 times R.
Now the decision is simple. If your cost per click is below that number you have a campaign. If it is above, you have a hobby. And because the whole thing is a product of four rates, you can also see immediately what a fix is worth: lifting the payable rate in that example from sixty to seventy percent adds about a sixth to your revenue per click without buying a single extra click.
Which leak should you fix first?
Fix the step that is losing the most calls in absolute terms, not the step with the ugliest percentage. Those are frequently different. A dispute rate that doubled from two percent to four looks alarming and costs you two calls in a hundred. A click-to-call rate sitting at twenty percent when the source normally runs at thirty is costing a hundred.
Then track the rates separately by source and by vertical. Blended averages are where money hides: one strong campaign will carry a failing one for months, and the statement total will look acceptable the entire time.
Frequently asked questions
What rates should I expect at each step?
They vary enormously by vertical, source, and geography, so a published benchmark would mislead you more than help. Measure your own for a few weeks, then treat those as the baseline and watch for movement.
Why do my connected calls not become payable?
Usually one of three things: the caller was outside the covered area, the call ended before the buffer without establishing intent, or the creative brought in people who were not in the market. Compare a handful of recordings against the qualification rules for your vertical.
How are duplicates handled?
A repeat call from the same phone number within the duplicate window is not billed again, so it does not appear as a second paid call on your statement. Frequent duplicates usually mean your media is hitting a narrow audience too often.
What do I do about a rising dispute rate?
Treat it as early feedback on one campaign rather than a billing problem. Pull the disputed calls, listen to what those callers wanted, and compare that against what your creative promised.
What will I be paid per call?
Rates depend on the vertical, the geography, and current buyer demand, and they track the buyer-side rates published on the pricing page. Apply as a publisher and we will confirm the current rate for the verticals you can supply.