Thursday, November 30, 2006
Local Search Trumps Print
The Kelsey Group is hosting a conference about local search in my hometown of Philadelphia with many of the heavy hitters in attendance.
The local search market is huge -- $31 billion -- and online advertising is dominating print, as reported by ZDNet's
Donna Bogatin.
For small to medium-sized vertical businesses, online advertising when coupled with a print directory ad dispenses with the need for newspaper and magazine ads.
I've been advertising for my wife's massage therapy practice for six months, and while we've gotten nowhere with ads in local and regional newspapers and magazines, working with local search services (yellowpages.com, Yahoo, Google, CitySearch) have all paid for themselves from the start. If you aren't in real estate or automotive, where newspaper advertising is part of the cost of doing business, you'll find the economics are staggeringly in favor of online advertising.
It's much more effective to respond to customers looking for a service (would you ever call a plumber just because of a nice ad, even if something wasn't broken?) rather than trying to hope that the 1 percent of people who are in the market to buy plane tickets or install new windows that day.
Advertising in a major metropolitan newspapers costs hundreds per week for a small ad, and verticals will likely get little return. Even advertising in my small (30,000 circ) suburban paper costs as much as running ads on three local search sites. I also tried Miva's pay per call service, which I thought would be a good model for a vertical, but that generated zero business, but cost me not a dime.
Posted By John Gartner at 01:37 PM
Permanent Link: Local Search Trumps Print
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(2) Comments on Local Search Trumps Print
Hi John,
Not quite sure of how your experience was when you referred to the pay per call service. Could you please clarify that last paragraph please?
Many thanks,
John Millican
Comments by john Millican : Thursday, November 30, 2006 at 10:41 PM
As an SEO/SEM firm we can say that advertiser feedback fully supports the notion that the ROI on print advertising is shrinking while online advertising ROI is increasing. Our client base is moving away from print and investing more into gaining optimum online placements.
Local Search on Google and Yahoo provides our clients with a large amount of traffic. Their IYP results have been mixed. The best IYP results have been from SuperPages.com and Kudzu.com with CitySearch not far behind. Based on client feedback the best decision an advertiser can make is to have their website optimized by a true SEO company for top natural placement. We also recommend that our clients employ a website analytics program to identify the sources of their website traffic and thereby evaluate the ROI.
We generally are not advocates of Pay-per-Click due to click fraud (and one major IYP offers a "guaranteed click" program but will not disclose the search terms to the advertiser which is very suspect). Regarding PPC vs. SEO, approximately 80% of clicks happen in the natural results vs. 20% for PPC. Proper website optimization can be done for a fraction of the cost of PPC and almost always eliminate ongoing monthly fees.
IYP may be cost prohibitive based on your average customer worth and the need to have top placement. Advertisers must consider clicks and conversion rates to evaluate ROI.
Your online marketing investments should be the result of a comprehensive review of options and strategic program development. Rather than rely on salespeople for information and making snap decisions it would make better sense to inquire with a SEO/SEM firm for unbiased answers and develop a structured Internet marketing program.
Local Search is great however having the knowledge to maximize your ROI makes all the difference in just how wonderful it is for your company.
Comments by Jim Hobson : Saturday, December 02, 2006 at 01:11 AM
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