Whenever I talk to people about call tracking in local advertising, they immediately assume that I’m also talking about Pay Per Call. I’m not. Or at least not necessarily.
If you want to charge the customer on a pay per call basis, then of course you must have call tracking.
But just because you support call tracking DOES NOT mean you have to charge customers on a performance basis. It is perfectly reasonable to continue to charge a customer, such as a small business on a subscription basis. In fact, many small businesses prefer to pay this way – they can budget for it and they don’t get any nasty surprises.
But those advertisers still expect to know that the advertising is performing well and they will get the Return on Investment promised to them by the sales rep.
The combination of call tracking and subscription is actually a best of both worlds scenario for most small businesses. Why don’t more people provide it? It seems like a big missed opportunity to me.
Predicting What Consumers Want to Buy 
Yes it is! Call Tracking leads inexorably to Pay per Call. Call Tracking is nice when you’re generating tons of calls for an advertiser, some of which he or she may not be aware of. But in a lousy economy where most businesses are getting many less calls from their advertising, no publisher wants to show an advertiser that “We brought you two calls last month”, especially when the advertiser was getting 30 calls a month (untracked) two years ago.
Yellow Pages has known for years that they’ll cut their revenue in half with Pay Per Call pricing. The minute a rep shows an advertiser their call report for the month, most advertisers are going to think for some kind of performance-based advertising (that, or a rate cut)
I’m not sure keeping customers ‘in the dark’ will end up being a great long-term business strategy.