Online Advertisers Turn to Pay-Per-Call – even if it costs them 7 to 10$ per call…

So once they have the lead on the phone it's easier to close the deal, as much more buying intention was demonstrated vs. just surfing and browsing around.-

"You've got a much better chance of closing a sale when you're talking to them rather than having them look at your site and 10 other competitors' sites," Brady said.

He estimated that he closes one sale for every 70 clicks, but with pay-per-call, it's one in three.

The Kelsey Group, a market-research firm based in Princeton, N.J., projects that pay-per-call will become a $1.4 billion to $4 billion industry by 2009.

That would roughly parallel the recent growth of pay-per-click advertising, which jumped from about $100 million in 2000 to $3.1 billion last year, according to Jupiter Research.