Jennifer Lind

New Citysearch + Google Maps

The Kelsey Group posted news today from Citysearch. iPhone has a new web browsing tool called Mapmash that combines Google Maps and the business profiles found on Citysearch.

The tool can be found at: http://mapmash.googlepages.com/citysearch.htm

It works much the same as many IYPs in that you type in a location, a category, and narrow down to the type of service you are looking for. You will then see a map with location points, which click through directly to the Citysearch business profile.

This service would only work for paid advertisers on Citysearch as free listings do not utilize the business profile.

Yellowpages.com Speech Recognition

MacRumors posted news that AT&T is testing the first speech recognition application on the iPhone. For example, on Yellowpages.com, you would say the city and state and the category of service you are looking for to retrieve your results instead of typing it in. It is definitely a great feature that would get you faster results. The only drawback is that you still need to hit navigational buttons so it is not completely hands free. Though it’s a great start!

New Products and State Advertising Options on Dexknows.com

Dex has recently unveiled new advertising options for 14 states in the Eastern and Midwestern US, including Nevada, Texas, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Tennessee, Indiana, Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina, New Jersey, South Carolina, Florida, and Pennsylvania.

The following new products are now available for ALL 28 states: Enhanced Package and Starter Package.

The Starter Package includes

• Placement above basic alphabetical listings
• A business profile that includes: website link, email link, tag line, and business description
• A replica of your Yellow Pages print ad

Enhanced Package includes

• Placement above Starter Package listings
• A business profile that includes: website link, email link, tag line, and business description
• A replica of your Yellow Pages print ad

The following products are available for the original 14 states (highlighted in Yellow): Priority Placement, Featured advertiser, enhanced package (new), starter package (new), trademark logo and video.

Priority Listing on Citysearch

Priority Listings appear in the first listing under a category search. The listing includes 1 category, a logo (this is the only product with a logo on the main listings results page), tagline, and URL.

There is only one PL available per category, and the product was just opened up to the Restaurants, Bars & Clubs, Hotels, Shopping, Spa & Beauty, Movies, and Events categories.

I read a post from Seth Godin a couple days ago about writing ad copy. He says that you need to write creative as if you were writing a classified ad. You have 30-50 characters to say what you need to say and draw people in. Once you start with a short phrase, you can carefully insert more words to get to the desired length you want. Godin says to “Gently and carefully add words until it’s as effective as possible, but as short as possible.”

With internet yellow pages or other online advertising placements, it seems that most times once a marketer decides to place an ad online, they throw the basics up - logo, business name, phone number, website - but no one pays any attention to creating the copy. On Superpages and Citysearch, you have 70 characters to state a promotional message and a reason for a customer to visit your site or give you a call. Here are some great examples of advertisers who have taken advantage of those 70 characters:

High Speed Internet Telephone-VOIP-No Contract. USA Cust Support.

Look Great, Feel Great. 25% off. Restylane, Sculptra. Free Consult.

The creative in these ads can stand alone. I didn’t include the title on purpose because you know from the creative what they do. They also make you a promise if you act.

Another thing to consider when writing creative is to tailor it to the channel you are placing advertising on, and by keyword or category. For example, if you are a maid service but you offer window cleaning and you also will wash the dinner dishes, you should have different creative for each. Someone who is looking for a dish washer after a big party is going to expect a different promise from you compared to someone who needs their windows washed.

As internet yellow page sites are expanding to mobile, tv, and other channels, I hope they will eventually consider allowing various types of creative for each outlet. Obviously someone who is driving in their car looking for a place to grab lunch has different needs than someone sitting on the couch ordering pizza.

To summarize: keep it short, make a promise, and tailor to your audience!

According to an AT&T Press Release regarding Yellowpages.com:

2008 FIRST-QUARTER HIGHLIGHTS INCLUDE:

• 70 percent year-over-year increase of unique visitor traffic to the site, according to comScore Media Trends report for March 2008.
• 25 percent year-over-year increase of monthly searches delivered through the YELLOWPAGES.COM Network — there are now more than 125 million searches a month.(3)
• Sales of YELLOWPAGES.COM online video ads have exceeded company projections.
• Mobile searches increased more than 50 percent from September 2007 to March 2008.(4)
• YELLOWPAGES.COM added Microsoft Corp. to its ad network though an exclusive arrangement, publishing YELLOWPAGES.COM advertisers across Microsoft local search sites, including Live Search, Live Search Maps and MSN Yellow Pages.
• Being ranked No. 31 in comScore’s top 100 Web properties for March 2008.

Read the complete press release here.

How do you market a purely online business in the local search realm? I’ve seen many of these companies turn to national advertising when faced with this challenge, but there are other options that will lower your cost per click.

Although you are a national company, you still have specific local market areas that you are targeting. It is important to still think locally because your advertisement should be focused on the local buyer on an IYP site. For example, a hotel comparison site like Priceline.com has hotels where you can reserve a room, it just happens that they are not specifically Priceline.com’s hotels.

A national buy will cost you tens of thousands on any IYP site. However, if you focus on specific metro markets that make sense for your company, you could drastically decrease your CPC and increase your relevance. For example, a site like jobweb.com, which is a career and job-search site for college students, could only target the big university towns like College Station, TX, Berkley, CA, Iowa City, IA, etc. Then if your CTR meets your expectations you can consider going to a national ad to draw in those smaller college towns.

When placing advertising on a new site, it is easy to just analyze that particular site: the site features, the navigation, the placement of your advertising, ect.

However, if you take a closer look at their network affiliates, you will see a whole other world. You are probably familiar with this because the major search engines also distribute their ads to other sites. It works the same way for most local search sites. For example, by placing performance-based ad on Superpages, your ad is being distributed to Local.com, neighborhood.com, infoUSA, and others.

To find these lists, just take a look at the main website and search for alliances or affiliates. Superpages’ affiliate list can be found here.

It’s important to look more at relevance and quality than quantity when analyzing these lists. Also, look at the types of channels they are distributing to. If you are interested in reaching your customers via mobile search, you will want to choose your advertising placement accordingly. Some sites are also starting to look at internet video, radio, and traditional advertising affiliates as well.

If you are planning to place ads on several sites - say you want to place directly on Local.com and you want a Superpages ad as well - you will want to research how your ads will be affected. They may be competing with each other. To get around this, you may try to place under differing categories, or place a national ad on Local.com and local ads on Superpages.

Yellowpages.com’s ads are now live on MSN. The sponsored results from Yellowpages.com are showing up at the top of MSN’s Live Search Maps and MSN Local Search.

I performed a couple of searches on MSN and had the best results finding the Yellowpages.com listings on the MSN Maps. I’m currently not seeing them live on MSN.com.

With the comScore’s recent web impressions report Superpages.com ranked higher in web impressions than Yellowpages.com. Yellowpages may be able to pull ahead of Superpages in ad impressions with this new partnership.

Results of comScore for March 2008: Superpages ranked 26th - in Top 50 Web Properties - with 27,672 impressions. Yellowpages.com ranked 31 with 24,962 impressions. MSN ranked 3rd with 121,013 impressions for March.

1. You should take the time to fill out the Enhanced Business Profile (MIP page). Keywords will narrow search results and are pulled from your more info page.
2. Fill out your category keywords for each heading. This can be found by doing a category lookup in the portal.
3. Use promotional text in the first line in addition to your business name (this is not an option if you have a local campaign, only an option if you are targeting by metro, state, or nationwide).
4. Relates to #3: use all the characters available to you for creative! For the title line, you have 50 characters and 70 characters for the promotional message.
5. Change your promotional text every 3-4 weeks if possible.

The newest interactive feature of the Internet Yellowpages is video. Citysearch, Yellowpages, and Superpages have all added this feature to their advertising products. Why should you add a video to your internet yellow pages listing? A video prompts action, enhances your company image, increases confidence, and will make you stand out from competitors.

For each internet yellowpages site, the production costs are all included in your product purchase. When you buy the video product, a local contractor will call you to arrange a meeting. Or, choose to use still pictures or your current television ad. The product includes professional voice talent and music. You’ll go through the production process, editing, and then your video will be live on your listing. Typically you are allowed all the edits you need before the ad is live, and other edits will need to be arranged with the videographer. Once you have the video, you own the rights to it. You can load the video onto your own website or use it in a television ad if you wish.

A few things to note about video ads on each IYP site:

Yellowpages:

• offers the video ad with any listing ad
• full length video is 45-60 seconds, you also get a thumbnail version for mobile devises and the URL
• video appears on more info page of your advertisement listing
• 500 value points
• Samples: Plumbing, Roofing & Siding

Superpages:

• 30-60 second spot with rights
• must purchase the video icon separately - icon is required
• video has information in the frame and appears as a “pop-up”
• Samples (video appears on the listing page so you will need to look for the video icon): Florist, Insurance

With Yellowpages’ recent partnership with MSN, Yellowpages is hoping for increased impressions and click thru rates. It’s a great attempt by Yellowpages to grab more of the marketshare and increase visibility of their ads. This partnership replaces Superpages’ services, who saw little traffic from MSN.

In my monthly client reports, I’ve seen impression data from Yellowpages increase through their various partnerships, but so far we have not seen the same results for the click data. As of now, there is no way to target your ad for the various affiliates out there. It seems that people who are searching on 411.com and areaguides.net should have the same interests in mind, though both of these sites are somewhat different. For example, 411.com is targetted more as a find-to-call site where you can find the business phone number you’re searching for. Areaguides.net has more info about local events, travel, and general city information. If you could target your creative for each of these sites, this may help to improve click thru rates. On the 411.com site, you may choose to customize your creative to include a call related call to action. on Areaguides.net, you may decide to include a coupon with a tourist related package. Of course, as the affiliate list grows, this may make operations difficult. With each listing, you would need to submit creative for each category, on each site.

 For an article regarding recent IYP partnerships: DMNews re: IYP partnerships - a look back on IYPs from 07 and the partnerships that were formed by Superpages, Yellowpages, Yellowbook, and Dex.