Andrew Shotland is No Leaking Bucket

Its always good to connect with Andrew Shotland at Loc@l SEO Guide. He wrote a great review of ReachLocal, Yext, Yodle, ect. and the difficulty in keeping merchants signed up after they've been acquired. I agree - within reason - you can't please everyone in a volume business. Acquired merchants may not always have their lead generation expectations met.

The churn problem can't be explained away as overly aggressive sales by the local search industry. There is a supply and demand problem within local search: Consumer demand doesn't always equal merchant supply. The local search marketing cos (Reach, Yodle, Yext, etc) do a fine job at acquisition, but without prior insight into consumer demand for that particular business, lead delivery to the merchant is going to be spotty. Thus local marketers deal with merchant churn. I previously called this problem a leaking bucket and it is.

With the VC activity in this space - there are still many that are bullish on this business model. WebVisible has another $20M to put toward solving this problem.

FastCall411 also has a solution with HotLeads! We solve the demand and churn problems for our clients by first identifying consumer demand, teasing the merchant with a few free trial consumer leads, then offering a targeted, precise value prop to the merchant: "we've proven we can deliver demand - just say yes and we will sign you up."

BTW, Andrew also wrote an interesting post on MerchantCircle.