These days, cell phones are a way of life. You can’t walk down any street in America without seeing someone texting up a storm or discussing a deal on their Bluetooth headset. More and more people are using their mobile phones for what they would have used a home phone for a decade ago. Just this morning the Pew Internet Project released a study that concluded that the cell phone has become the hardest communications technology for consumers to give up. So the question remains – will the home phone become extinct?

The telecommunications companies that provide your home phone service certainly don’t want that to happen, and so they are taking action. Telcos are increasingly offering wireless service bundled with home phone service, whether through their own offerings or by partnering with a carrier. Verizon is in the thick of things with Double and Triple Freedom packages paving the way for quad play (home phone/Internet/paid TV/wireless), and is now in talks to partner with Qwest to provide wireless service packaged with Qwest’s other offerings. The hope is that consumers will not feel pressured whether to “cut the cord” or not, but will see opportunity and convenience in maintaining bundled services.

I thought I would take a look at one of Verizon’s advertisements for its wireless & home phone service bundle to see how shoppers are reacting. The campaign highlights network reliability across the two platforms and is up-front about price. Will shoppers respond?

At Compete we like to go beyond impressions and click rates and start with engagement when measuring campaigns. Engagement refers not only to the number of people that clicked on an advertisement, but were taken to a landing page and then clicked again (somewhere on the landing page). We also look at people that click on the advertisement but then do nothing else on that site (“click-and-run”).

• 41% of shoppers engaged with the landing page after clicking through the ad; 59% did not

This is a positive result. We took a small sample of recent telco ads to compare and most had less than 40% engagement. Verizon could likely further improve engagement though by increasing the campaign’s share of search-referred sessions. Currently less than 1% of sessions were initiated through search.

Both the placement of the ads and the marketing message may have helped the campaign do better than similar campaigns in the telco space. Curiosity could also be a factor in the advertisement’s success as consumers learn more about bundled service between their wireless and home phone providers. While a lot more research is needed to completely assess whether consumers will respond to wireless/home phone bundled service, at first look it appears promising. So keep on talking!

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