Do Locals Give a Click? Negotiating the Buys to Make Local Advertising Work

By Richard Rosen, from adotas
Successful local advertisers and business owners know that to close a deal, they must ask for the sale. It’s a bold question at times, designed to push a hesitant buyer toward action.

Now, take this same principle — one that you’ve no doubt mastered — and apply it in the other direction: to your advertising buy.

What am I talking about? Here’s the thing: local advertisers often find themselves stuck in between the new and the old. Online local search brings lots of clicks and pay-for-performance economics, but doesn’t offer an understanding of each local market. Traditional media — primarily newspapers and Yellow Pages — are well-entrenched in their communities, but have yet to truly embrace the performance-based model that merchants can get online.
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A Fitting Fix to Local Search: Why the “Less is More” Approach Provides Real Pay-Per-Call Benefit

By Richard Rosen, published in adotas
There’s been a ton of news on the Google-eBay announcement around pay-per-call. The message is that pay-per-call is a way to apply pay-for-performance advertising to something small businesses actually want — phone calls. The publisher now has something else to package and sell to businesses —phone leads. But what no one is talking about yet is how pay-per-call can — and is — revolutionizing the search experience for the consumer.

Consider this familiar scenario: you need a plumber (or any service-oriented business). You search online for Los Angeles + plumber. More than 8,000,000 listings appear. You add the words residential + licensed + emergency. Still, there are more than 226,000 websites listed. Try local search and you’ll find 5,600+ plumbers in Los Angeles. From here, you start dialing, and probably make several calls before finding someone to fix your leaky pipe.

Local Search is a Poor State of Affairs for the Consumer
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I Need It NOW: Real Opportunity In Local Search

(By Richard Rosen, from adotas)
Local search carries all the earmarks of a gold rush in the making: tens of thousands — no, make that millions — of small businesses hungry for more customers. Even greater numbers of consumers with leaky faucets, dented fenders and crabgrass, all itching to connect with neighborhood service providers as we speak.

Everyone’s now vying for a chunk of the ad budgets of this legion of entrepreneurs — everyone from your local newspaper and yellow pages publisher to Web giants Microsoft, Yahoo and Google. Yet the opportunity is vast and, despite endless odes to the promise of local search, the market remains largely untapped.
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