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;
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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