Posts Tagged ‘directory marketing’

Google Local Business Listing Ads Results Are In And They’re Not Good…So Far

Friday, December 4th, 2009

As part of directory’s traffic cannibalization strategy, Google had launched local listing ads a bit more than a month ago in the San Francisco, and San Diego markets. They announced today that they would no longer accept new sign ups and will discontinue the ads in Mid-December. What has been seldom reported is the kind of results that advertisers have seen when buying local listing ads.
A client of ours ran these ads for a month, the results you may ask?

About 0.05% phone conversions, plus 0.2% click to website conversions as this image tells us;

local business ad results

Note that in the meantime regular, unpaid local business listing outperformed the click to website conversion by 2.
I think these results are weak, and Google seems to agree. In a typical Google fashion, they offer this client a refund, and a $100 advertising credit towards Adwords. One can only admire the care Google takes to preserve relationships with small business advertisers. The fact that they came up with his ’compensation’ scheme and a form letter is telling however of widespread dismayed results for this advertising product (If anyone cares to share results to back this up?)
The question I, and probably a some folks at Google too, is why did that product not perform? Has Google already pushed the slicing and dicing of his 1st page SERP traffic to its effective limit?

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Posted in Google, Internet Yellow Pages, Local SEO, directory marketing | 2 Comments »

Google Local Business Center Ads or The Onslaught on Internet Yellow Pages and Directories

Friday, October 9th, 2009

The writings were on the wall for some time, with the (still limited) launch of Google Local Business Center Ads, Google is squeezing local directories, and yellow pages publishers out of valuable real-estate and clearly going after their business.

This is not for the lack of warning signs, Google hardly went through the back door, traditional directory and yellow pages publishers have known for some time that major online ad inventory carriers, Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Facebook have the upper hand over them. Given the fragmented U.S. market, most yellow pages, directories, and local search properties cannot muster enough audience to build a compelling advertising alternative, even on a local media level.

Maybe for a lack of better idea, a prevailing strategy among directories has been to develop revenues on borrowed time monetizing PPC market inefficiencies while building mostly easy-to-replicate reporting features that are hard to differentiate from a merchant perspective. The bad news is that managing PPC campaigns on major search engines for advertisers has already become an increasingly commoditized service, and competition is only getting heftier among traditional yellow pages and internet-based local search players.

Advertising markets inefficiencies tend to self-correct over time, merchants grow in sophistication, learn to replicate successful endeavors, and move away from local directory providers to become direct customers of the most popular search and social sites. Time and money spent educating local merchants about search marketing turns out to be self-defeating, as it eventually benefits competitive Internet media giants.

We are coming to the tipping point, what are the viable strategies for local directories now?

At SEO Samba, we are proposing to local directories to monetize the only part that search engines can not monetize; the organic results. We think it makes a whole lot of sense, and we welcome all directory marketers to join us and fight back.

Any other long-term viable strategy out there folks would like to share?

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Posted in Google, Internet Yellow Pages, directory marketing | Comments Off