Do More Phone Numbers Mean A Recovering Economy?

Believe it or not, local phone number purchases are being viewed as economic indicators, akin to the unemployment rate, GDP, CPI, housing starts, the Dow, retail sales and broadband Internet penetration. Cloud telephony provider CallFire, which says it processes billions of phone calls, analyzed local-phone-number purchase patterns by its small business customers nationwide from mid-September 2008 to December 2012. According to its data, “some states are on fire, others are positively chilly and the rest are somewhere in between.” The “hot states” include Arizona, New Jersey, California, Washington and Nevada. “Local phone number purchases can serve as a proxy for small business economic activity, largely because businesses typically purchase phone numbers to track marketing spending,” explains CEO Dinesh Ravishanker, pointing out that the numbers are “trackable” in that businesses place different numbers on specific ads, billboards, email campaigns, etc., to judge the effectiveness of that spend. The more numbers purchased, the more marketing campaigns are being tracked. Who’s not hot? North and South Dakota, West Virginia, Iowa and Mississippi, the five “coldest.”