According to SearchEngineLand.com and NaturalSearchBlog.com, it appears that the Internet Yellow Pages (IYP) players such as SuperPages.com, YellowPages.com or CitySearch.com need all the help they can get to get traffic to their sites.
IYPs are on the slow and steady decline of traffic for the last year.
This isn’t that surprising as making money online from local content is difficult as there is not a clear cut monitization equation out there yet. And without revenue, its hard to justify traffic building and visitor acquisition. These articles state that:
“I see quite a lot of lost opportunities in SEO terms when I look over most business directory sites. Displaying the same, bare-bones content for a business’s listing which is also being displayed on hundreds of other sites is going to be less and less sufficient to maintaining organic referral traffic from search.
It may be necessary to expand out your taxonomy development efforts or partner with a company like ShopLocal to find out what is being sold at many of the stores listed in your directory. Finding ways to expand out keyword-rich description data about companies could be the deciding point in whether or not sites can continue to obtain natural, non-paid referral traffic.”
Here at ShopLocal, within our national multi-channel comparison shopping engine (CSE) division called ShopLocal.com, this same core problem of content differentiating has been top of mind for years. It is a key challenge that anyone in the local space needs to continually address. I do agree with Chris Smith (author of the above cited posts) in that many of the search and browse results pages that these IYPs return are very bare and void on any original and/or interesting content. They are nothing more than address and phone number. No store hours. No list of store services. No store events. A lot of nothing in other words.
ShopLocal in the areas where we were not content rich has frequently partnered and/or licensed content. The IYPs should consider doing exactly that as suggested in the above articles. Its the fastest and easiest way to start making your core local content (in this case directory information) unique in the eyes of the all important search engines, as well as providing a richer, more useful set of answers to consumers.
Rack up another SmartSearch client. The Home Depot launched today, both within Google and Yahoo!, a very store focused and localized SEM campaign. Here is a live search results page that currently features a Home Depot SmartSearch ad and here is the unique dynamic landing page that the user is directed to upon click.
Many thanks to Reprise Media in NYC (The Home Depot’s search agency) for deeply working with the ShopLocal to make this possible. By working as partners serving the same client/advertiser (e.g., The Home Depot), we were collectively able to bring all of the following behind-the-scenes integrations live:
- Reprise Media’s search engine tracking / bidding optimization via Omniture
- Home Depot’s web analytic tracking via Coremetrics
- ShopLocal’s web analytic tracking via WebTrends
Below are a few visuals that show this new localized search program in action.
Here is a screen shot of The Home Depot Google ad for "Garden Supplies" within the Norfolk, VA market.
The SEM ad title is dynamically generated, as well as numerous ad copy points (4 in this case) and the landing page URL
Finally, if a user did in fact click on the Google text ad, they would be taken to this circular page view which features the highest density of "Garden Supplies" items
So from the initial roll out point of just one single market (Kansas City), the JCP search team has seen results worthy enough to increase the size of the campaign by 6X! Wish that we could share more specific metrics of success, but got to maintain client confidentiality. Just use some basic logic here t to think through the fact that no one would dial-up their advertising investment level in today’s economy without solid results.
Even rolled out a small incremental improvement within this expanded SmartSearch campaign that includes relevant and customized per unique word the display URL. So in this example, since the keyword was "Kids Clothing", the display URL shows up as "JCPenney.shoplocal.com/kids"
Live markets for JCP within Yahoo! & Google:
- Atlanta
- Denver
- Houston
- Kansas City
- Milwaukee
- Sacramento
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The possibilities of distribution points for weekly ad content continues to increase. Today two versions of the same core weekly ad application went live for Target. These apps were built to live on user’s start / homepages that iGoogle and My Yahoo! pretty much have a monopoly on. Specifically the two apps that went live were for:
Here is what the two apps look like in their native state once they have been “installed” within a user’s personalized homepage (Note that all throughout this post I use the word ‘install’ very loosely. What I am trying to refer to is the process of allowing and adding these apps/gadgets to a user’s homepage. No real code is actually being installed on a user’s local machine):
This is how the My Yahoo! open app appears on a user's homepage in its native 'small' state
The iGoogle gadget and how is appears on a user's homepage in it's native 'un-expanded' state
Here is what each app looks like once a user chooses to expand them to the ‘large’ view:
This is how the My Yahoo! open app appears in its "expanded" state
This is how the iGoogle gadget appears in its "expanded" state
So now for a quick comparison of these two competing platforms:
- My Yahoo!
- A much more complicated ‘install’ process that involves up to three different clicks, compared to the one (1) click ‘install’ on iGoogle. Yes, Yahoo! Open Apps allow for more user driven privacy controls and a great degree of social features, so these come at a cost of a more involved ‘installation’ process
- The “full” or “expanded” view of the app can be built in Adobe Flash / Flex, which in this case the Target app is. This just opens up the door to a richer, more engaging user experience
- The “full” or “expanded” view has some graphical display ads wrapped around the content. I happened to catch one ad with some layering / shine-through issues going on that was interfering with the right hand part of the app
- By default, it appears that the Target Open app within My Yahoo! is setup to auto opt-in all users into the below two (2) types of communications. Great for the marketer, but maybe not so great for the unknowing consumer:
- iGoogle
- Within the native, non-expanded view, the gadget gets cut-off. This looks sort of odd and is a bummer since this is the view state that most users will see the vast majority of the time
- Built using light, fast and universal coding languages such as HTML, Javascript and DHTML
- Since it is not built in flash, in this case a much deeper integration is exposed at the item detail page that pulls in an Amazon.com hosted layer that brings in all sorts of rich functionality like local inventory look up, one-click add to cart, add to lists, ratings and reviews
- If a user decides to ’share’ the app with friends, within iGoogle the app makes some useful suggestions as to which friends of yours you might consider based upon your emailing habits within Gmail. With Yahoo!, this is just one big blank box that is nowhere as user friendly
Here is a complete set of production screen grabs of the widgets from both iGoogle and My Yahoo! posted up on Flickr just in case. Finally, a bit of well deserved recognition to the Target and AKQA teams that did all of the heavy lifting to get these fairly complex apps launched.
The team actually did it. After months of internal R&D, the first SmartSearch campaign is finally live on Google for JCPenney (only for the Kansas City DMA currently) and on Yahoo!. This marks a historic day here at ShopLocal as the SmartSearch product allows for fully automated, localized search engine marketing (SEM) on both Google & Yahoo!. Below is an actual screen shot from a Google search result page for the keyword “womens apparel” that comes back with a SmartSearch paid in the top paid position:
The SmartSearch ad on this LIVE Google search result page is the very first paid ad in the top ranked spot. Note that within this particular screenshot the organic search results are from Chicago, but all of the paid ads are from the Kansas City DMA area due to fact that ShopLocal is located in Chicago
And here is what a user would see if they actual clicked on the Google ad:
Notice how the SmartCircular landing page is loaded with localized, relevant content to the search term "womens apparel".
And just to be fair to our good friends over at Y!, here is how the same live SmartSearch campaign shows up within a Yahoo! search results page (SRP) for the keyword “bedding” within the Kansas City geo-location:
The SmartSearch ad for JCP is showing up in the fourth (4th) position in the paid search portion within Yahoo! currently
A few of the most notable differences between this specific search effort and all the rest of the pack of typical paid search campaigns is:
- Hyper-Local Focus so that a retailer’s store foot print drives where the ads will be shown and what content will be within any given ad. So if there are no “shoes” on sale within some store locations, then those underlying geographies of the country would not get targeted with a search keyword of “shoes”
- In-Store Focused Conversion instead of the typical online or eCommerce sale based conversion. This type of paid search campaign is not intended to drive online orders, but rather shoppers into local stores that make purchases offline
- In-Store Sale Based Content as the circular or weekly ad is the underlying source of this promotional store focused set of keyword ads. This helps leverage this core existing offline assets
- Full Automation of the creation of all the localized keywords, ad copy and landing page URLs. Once a set of ad copy templates are setup and agreed to by the client and/or agency, this entire process of determining what keywords should be active for what markets and what the associated ad copy and landing page URLs should be is all system driven. The sheer volume of keywords and associated ad copy and landing page URLs would never be possible to be done by humans on a week in and week out basis
Some of the key features that SmartSearch has built in version 1.0 are:
- Fully dynamic and localized search ad copy that can pull in the correct, localized information in regards to:
- # of Items On Sale within the relevant content slice that the keyword pertains to
- Example: 35 Deals (on womens apparel items on sale)
- Relevant & Exact Keyword
- Price Range, from lowest priced item and/or to highest price item of the all the items within the relevant content slice that the keyword pertains to
- Retailer Location, as expressed via a mixture of City Name, State Abbreviation, or ZIP Code
- Example: Shop Your Local K. C. (Kansas City, MO)
- Retailer Name
- Sale End Date of the in-store promotion that this content is being drawn from
- Example: Sale Ends Jun 30
- Auto ad copy template selection so that when some of the above dynamic ad copy variables get too long (total # of characters), the systems gracefully falls back through a series of alternate ad copy templates selecting the one that best fits the dynamic data being thrown at it and at the same time attempting to maximize all available allowable characters within both the headline/title and the description line(s)
- Client specific business rules can be created and applied so that each unique advertiser can tune the ad copy templates and associated landing pages (very powerful)
- Fully dynamic and localized landing page (via a precisely relevant click thru URL) that takes the user deep within the ShopLocal hosted SmartCircular site
- Support for third party bidding and management tools so that search agencies can still use their same tool sets to manage these localized paid search campaigns in a native manner
- Support for both Google and Yahoo! paid search campaigns. The other search engines are not supported currently, but that doesn’t mean too much as they all collectively only represent less than 15% of the overall US search volume as of May 2009 (comScore data)
Here is a practical break down of how the two JSP example (live) ads from both Google and Yahoo! actually breakdown according to the ad copy specifications imposed by each search engine:
- Google AdWords
- Keyword: Womens Apparel
- Headline (25 characters max): Apparel At JCPenney
- Line 1 (35 characters max): 35 Deals Starting At $4 Visit
- Line 2 (35 characters max): Your Local JCPenney By Jun 30
- Yahoo! Search Marketing
- Keyword: Bedding
- Title (40 characters max): Bedding From $5
- Description (70 characters max): Shop Your Local K.C. JCPenney Store. Sale Ends Jun 30.
For another look at what the SmartSearch product looks like in action, you can personally check it out by using the Google Preview Ad Tool. Just click the image above and make sure to enter a keyword of "womens apparel" and select a State location of "Missouri ---Kansas City MO" and you'll get to see localized search in action.
Finally, a special thanks to the JCP and 360i (JCP’s search agency) teams for all working really hard on this launch and making hyper-local paid search a reality.
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