On September 13th, MIVA will be launching their new MIVA Pay-Per-Call ad service in the UK market. Advertisers can begin signing up and readying their accounts now, but will have to wait for the launch date to start running their campaigns.

Despite the hype over the launch of pay-per-call through the AOL search engine at the beginning of this past year, MIVA was actually the first company to launch pay-per-call listings when they quietly snuck it into the market back in September of 2004. The UK launch will also mark the 5-year anniversary of MIVA's entry into the UK pay-per-click market.

Pay-per-call works on the same principles as the more popular pay-per-click option, but directs searchers to call a toll-free number instead of clicking on a link. Advertisers then pay a fee for each phone call that they receive. The option is useful for small businesses that don't have a web site or for service based companies that have an easier time converting (and tracking) phone calls rather than web leads.

A statement from MIVA claims that over three quarters of UK small to mid-size businesses do not have a web site presence. That means that pay-per-call will have the potential to add an enormous amount of advertising buyers to the UK search market.

"Pay-Per-Call has the potential to revolutionize the advertising market, just as Pay-Per-Click has done" commented Seb Bishop, Chief Marketing Officer, MIVA, Inc. "On September 13 - five years to the day that we launched Pay-Per-Click in the UK - we will launch an online advertising product with the potential to service a much wider audience of advertisers than Pay-Per-Click does today. The fact that businesses can target their ads by locality opens the door for the hundreds of thousands of local businesses in the UK to take advantage of performance marketing online."

Advertisers will have the option of running both pay-per-call ads and pay-per-click ads on the same set of search results.

Since research by The Kelsey Group shows that incoming phone calls have an average conversion rate of 40%, pay-per-call has the potential to be a powerful sales tool for the small business market.