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Pay per call advertising service VoiceStar has been acquired by local advertising company Marchex.

Terms of the deal are as follows:

Marchex total anticipated investment to acquire VoiceStar will be $28 million, consisting of approximately $20 million in transaction consideration and $8 million in company investment. Specifically, transaction consideration consists of approximately $12.9 million in cash consideration and Marchex will issue approximately $7.1 million in restricted stock that is subject to vesting over two-and-one-half years from closing to certain employees of VoiceStar; and company investment consists of $8 million relating to products, infrastructure, human resources and other items through 2008. The acquisition is expected to close by October 1, 2007.

VoiceStar’s click to call service allows advertisers to track calls related to local advertisements both online and offline. Other competitors include Ingenio. The service sells advertisers a block of phone numbers ($10/month/number) to be placed in papers or on websites. Each number is unique to an advertising campaign and routes to a single or multiple business lines.

For instance, the number from one campaign can be routed to a specific department or only active during business hours. VoiceStar then tracks calls from these numbers routed through their softswitch to compile data on the return on investment from each campaign.

VoiceStars primary clients are advertising networks, who use the service to help individual advertisers. As of this past February, they claimed 400 clients with 20,000 individual advertisers working through those clients.
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Source: Nick Gonzalez

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