Local Search at SES

Posted on March 4, 2006
Filed Under Conferences |

Very interesting article found at searchenginejournal, about New York SES and the panels related to local search.

Patricia Hursh, president and founder of SmartSearch Marketing, was one of the panelists on the first panel and she presented an interesting case study on a national client (an ISP) that wanted to target regionally on Google. Her agency ran three campaigns:1. One was purely national
2. The second was “national” but used place name keywords and other geographic modifiers
3. The third campaign used no geographic keywords but relied on Google’s IP targeting AdWords product.

…if consumers who click on local/geotargeted ads. Sometimes I feel like I’m in an echo chamber so it’s gratifying to see real-world examples from those “in the trenches” that validate these hypotheses.

Now to the Google click to call beta advertiser, who emerged during the second panel and is in the hotel industry. We didn’t get into detail on the program but he characterized the performance as “great.” Panelist Jake Baillie, president of TrueLocal, wondered aloud whether the performance of the product was impacted in any way by the absence of competition. The marketer said he didn’t think that accounted for it. But he did say that he thought the presence of the call option motivated consumers to go directly to the hotel rather than continuing to click around. It provided an immediacy for the consumer that made it correspondingly quite effective for the advertiser.

…

Greg Sterling is managing editor of The Kelsey Group. He also leads The Kelsey Group’s the Interactive Local Media program, focusing on local search. Greg came to The Kelsey Group from TechTV’s “Working the Web,” the first national television show dedicated to e-business and the Internet.

read on if you like

Technorati Tags: SES, Searchengine, local search, Click to Call, Google, Truelocal, New York