Friday, June 1, 2007

"There isn’t sufficient local search volume to deliver enough traffic/leads to SMBs"

Greg Sterling recently posted comments on a speech given by Joe Walsh, CEO of YellowBook

http://gesterling.wordpress.com/
According to the post, Walsh said: "There isn’t sufficient local search volume to deliver enough traffic/leads to SMBs and small businesses won’t self-provision ads.

Is there sufficient local search volume? comScore estimates (or under estimates) that roughly 1 billion of 7 billion monthly searches are local (15 percent) and that 52 percent of local searches involve looking for a phone number or address. A significant number of these searches will result in a phone call – I estimate 100,000,000 calls per month. (I reviewed tens of millions of call records while Vice President of Business Development at CallSource and Jambo. Consumers overwhelmingly call when in need of a local product or service.)

The problem with local search? A very significant percentage of calls to merchants listed in today’s local directories will be made to unqualified, out-of-business, or otherwise unresponsive merchants. There IS sufficient local search volume to deliver enough traffic/leads to SMBs. We just need to funnel search to relevant, lead seeking merchants. FstCall411 taps into a vast source of currently unmonetized consumer phone calls. Calls made to the majority of the 14 million merchants listed in the local database who never answer their phone (10% have disconnected #s). 100MM calls to 14MM merchants averages 7 calls per month - not enough to get Joe Walsh excited. 100MM calls to the 10% of the 14MM that are really relevant (1.4MM) is 70 calls per month. Fire up the pay-per-call engine (and get the call connection rate high enough) and that’s $700 (at an average of $10 / call)

Will they self-provision? Walsh is right - they won’t. But send them 70 calls per month, and let the local merchant know the calls are coming from you and they’ll start calling us to sign-up.

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