Warren Kay, Director, Emerging Products, Yahoo! Steven Stern, go2.com Jake Baillie, President, TrueLocal.com Doug Perlson, Chief Operating Officer, Seevast
Moderator: Justin Sanger
For 3 years, it was local search is hot. Last year, it turned to local search is now. Mobile local search is beginning as well.
Warren Kay is up first. Runs emerging products group of Yahoo marketing. Expand on yahoo local for consumers as well as focusing more on geotargeting for new advertising interface.
Yahoo from consumer perspective - largest local destination on web. 60k city pages, 80k zip codes and 600 neighborhoods. All populated by user generated content. Editors doesn't scale well, so user generated content is the way to scale.
Example of woman posting comment on a restaurant in Yahoo Local. Content can be seen via searches as well as in her 360 page to all her network of friends. Users can review local places and searchers can see these reviews. User tagged 11 different friends on his 360 page.
Flickr geo-targeting - yahoo local ties in geotargeting aspect to various properties, including Flickr. Can see all the places a user has visited because user tagged his photos with the area name. Can see actual street maps for bars that users have tagged as being on that street.
Y Labs: Geo-referenced photos - can tag photos that you take with your cell phone simply by using the cell tower's location. it will give you choices of places/landmarks to use as tags for that photo you just took with your cell phone. These tags will then be used when you upload the photo to Flickr.
Merchants - Adding services for the other 25 million merchants other than the US ecommerce 200k. reaching out to those merchants who aren't yet advertising via the web. yahoo local can develop a profile page for merchants even if the merchant doesn't have a website. Can upload lots of information about your business into this profile page. This info is fed into the listing level for the consumer.
Exciting feature of new search marketing platform is geotargeting. How the consumer mentions their location and how the advertiser targets that location is meshed together. ULM = universal location manager - a cookie that Yahoo captures to know the user location is very accurate. It leverages Yahoo's network-wide user location data for geo-location of Yahoo traffic (for things like movies, weather, etc)
IP address can also indicate user location.
Advertisers can target ads by market, region withing market or by city and surrounding area.
Key Differentiators: Where On Earth : state of the art location recognition technology Clear and distinct target areas: national, state and designated market areas Yahoo Network: Universal Location Manager enables yahoo to increase listing relevancy through user defined locations on Y properties such as weather,maps and movies.
Mobile growth in the US is accelerating Over 240 million mobile subscribers by 2010
Will have 80% mobile penetration by 2010. One in 5 mobile consumers use advanced mobile services. Increased adoption of wap-enabled phones is fueling growth. The demographic is young, which marketers covet.
yahoo online sponsored search is mirrored in mobile sponsored search. Works the same way as online sponsored search. User can either browse or peform a free form key word search. Yahoo Listing goes to the advertiser WAP site or a Y generated WAP site. If merchant doesn't have a WAP site, Yahoo can create one for the merchant.
Doug Perlson is up next from Seevast (including Kanoodle, Moniker, etc). He spends his time at Pubcon doing the contextual panel usually, because of Kanoodle. But in the last few years, he sees that context is only one way to target, and they see Local search as being another great way of targetting advertising.
Local Marketing Huge growth in local search marketing 3.4 billion in 2005 growing to $13 billion in 2010 (kelsey group) enormous opportunity for publishers and advertisers in local sponsored links
Local businesses use Valpack, Pennysavers, Yellow Pages National Advertisers using online advertising but want to target at local level
Local search will be effective for both advertiser and publisher perspective.
Search Sites, Content Sites, and Navigation
Typical local search is user-defined such as "pizza in Las Vegas", but the advertiser may want to limit ot certain zip codes.
From content site perspective, use sponsored links to target local content and local users. If users are on a local content site, it will be easy to reach those local users, but you still want to geotarget, in case a user on the site isn't really within that locality.
You can geotarget content listings. Buying contextual listing will cost you more, but if you layer in a level of geotargeting (such as by zip code) it will be more effective.
Direct Navigation - finding a web site through a browser type-in. This is not referring to typos/traffic squatters, because these don't help the advertisers. But there is still an opportunity for direct type-ins. Parked pages are a great opportunity to run your sponsored links. (ex. a parked real estate site for a specific city). Track your direct navigation advertising separately.
Keys to success:
Advertisers - all local not the same - separate creative, bidding and tracking code for search, geo content and direct navigation
Publishers - should work with networks that have ability to charge premium for local content (i.e. should convert at higher rates for advertisers (up to 40% higher).
What's next in local? Mobile, pay per call, ISP, GPS
ISPs have lots of local data stored, so there may be local advertising opportunities with these ISPs - targetting down to a street address, since the ISPs have this kind of information.
Pitches Kanoodle, pulse360, and moniker.com. First to put sponsored links on pages, first to do lots of other things (goes too fast to get it all down here).
Jake Baillie (bakedjake) from TrueLocal is up next.
Local Search Ads - Helpful and not so helpful tips
Weird panel for him to do because 2 years ago Justin called him about doing local search, and Jake said he didn't believe in local search, and here he is running a local search engine. Wake up and get in the local game. Decided to teach people how to spam the search engines rather than giving a pretty speech.
These tactics apply just as well in organic, but they work in ad side and there's more money to be made in the ad side.
The best way to exploit local is keyword expansion. Obvious geo expansion - cities, zip codes, and states. These are the obvious local keywords to use (example Detroit real estate). Non-obvious expansion phrases include neighborhoods, area codes, counties, airport codes and metro areas. People in chicago dont look for a chicago restaurant. No, they type in a chicago neighborhood. In some markets, area codes imply a specific type of person. Seasoned traffic will look for airport codes, such as LAX and advertisers may serve visitors in the airport area.
Word expansion - product names, brand names, skus, slang/industry terms, government terms.
Government terms - a top local query is DMV. Some reasons a person might be going to the DMV is that they have a DUI. A DUI lawyer would want to target this term.
People Pitfalls - regional names for products (pop vs. soda), different names for localities depending on the user's perspectives (downtown chicago vs. the loop)
When targetting ads, use the language that the locals use.
The Tracking Problem Online > Offline tracking - good for stores yet makes the PPC market look bad.
track, track, track: (i zoned out during this part, but I guess the idea is to track). :)
Some businesses are more suited local advertising: anything service based restaurants (sometimes) golf courses local b2b
Localize your CTR!
You should be expecting upwards of 10%! Use localized ad copy - at least cities. 20-30% ctrs can be had with neighborhood names in ads. Of course you need a call to action on the page that speaks to that local targeting. If you mention the location in the ad, and you don't mention it on the landing page, they will leave and not come back.
Lots of choices to put local search ads: google, yahoo, msn, ask, online yellow pages, truelocal.com, local, com, newspaper and alt. magazine sites, vertical specific sites.
Local industry groups, local business development groups, hobbyists, geo-vertical directories are also good place to put your local ads.
Ran out of time, so he skipped the rest of the presentation.
Steven Stern is up next. Started in print yellow pages and went right to mobile from print. Will show trends in mobile.
Trends - shows lots of stats but the gist of it is that mobile usage is increasing, and lots of those people are the right target market for a lot of advertisers.
About go2: go2 has been a market leader in mobile, local search directories and movie guides. They launched go2 in 1999. Audience is mostly male for go2 - traveling businessmen, new home owners, etc. Great demographics for income and age. The key to driving traffic with mobile phones is being on all the major carriers (which go2 apparently is). go2 has lots of channels such as business, dining, directions, directory, entertainment, movies, search, shopping, travel, etc. You can do almost anything on mobile. The biggest barriers to mobile is that the carriers are still developing their ad and revenue models. Carriers are protective of their users. Must get a relationship with the carriers if you want to have a mobile site. Phones are all different, and carrier's all work on different networks, so new mobile sites need to be able to develop content so it shows on the majority of phones. Your site needs to have content that actually works on a mobile phone. You have to offer something compelling to the carriers, something they don't have, so they will put it on their decks. This is what will get you significant traffic.
Steven shows some examples of things that go2 has to offer (colleges, golf channel, premium directory listings, email captures, etc.)
