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ELEVATED KEYWORD PRICES IN the search engine market have led CruiseOne and Cruises Inc. to turn to pay-per-call advertising, where marketers pay for rings rather than clicks.

Mike Monahan, director of marketing and e-commerce for the Fort Lauderdale, FL-based companies — which sell cruises on major ship lines as subsidiaries of National Leisure Group — said the company was an early adopter of pay-per-click advertising, back when Overture was still Go2. And initially, it was very effective

But recently, elevated keyword prices in the travel and cruise sectors have eroded Monahan's return on investment. That led him to consider pay-per-call advertising, where visitors who respond to an ad call a toll-free number rather than clicking through to a Web site. Monahan's company pays only when calls are completed.

He started in February by testing pay-per-call ads within the FindWhat network and was intrigued but “not blown away” by the results; new calls came in and some new business was booked, but the volumes were low. But a few months later, AOL announced it would begin offering pay-per-call ads using a platform by Ingenio. Monahan decided to do a trial run on the AOL network with an ad that routed calls to two of the agents affiliated with his company.

“I was stunned by the response,” he said. “We got 20 phone calls in a day. Four were solid prospects who wound up booking cruises, and one other was for a group vacation for 16 people — eight cabins.” Monahan recently enlisted 18 more agents as a call group to rotate the job of taking calls from the ads — which also expanded to include more keywords and phrases, including “Caribbean travel.”

“With pay-per-click ads, we found that about half the prospects would get to our Web sites, find our phone number and call us directly,” he said. “Most of the others would submit a request for information online and we'd call them back. That seems to be a truth about the cruise business: If you're going to lay out $1,500 to $2,000 for a trip, you want some kind of accountability from a live person. You need somebody to blame.”