Telmetrics President Bill Dinan wrote an interesting piece in MediaPost this week that offers some practical advice on building pay-per-call programs.

One of the more interesting topics he covers is whether it makes sense for publishers to place a cap on a pay-per-call program. The question involves a real dilemma for publishers. With a cap, publishers stand a very good chance of overdelivering on a program and leaving money on the table. For many operators, the cap is a strong disincentive. Without a cap, they risk scaring away risk-averse small-business advertisers.

To overcome this dilemma, Dinan proposes something I would call a “rolling cap,” which is not unlike the way some mobile phone plans handle unused minutes.

“A good compromise between capping and not capping is to offer a rollover set-up. If an advertiser hits a cap, the overage from another month can carry over to meet the advertiser’s budget and the full value of the advertisement,” Dinan writes in the MediaPost article.

The Kelsey Report is currently researching a report on the practical issues surrounding pay-per-call implementation for directory publishers.

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