Mobile & Local Get Down To Business
Wednesday’s performance marketing session, Tactical Search : Local & Mobile Search, promised an update on the mobile and local landscape, along with practical advice on current best practices. And, the session did deliver on both counts.
The panel was composed of Zach Anderson, VP of Marketing at TicketCity, Sean Cummings, Marketing Director of Ask.com, Erika Moersch, Manager of Paid Serach at Outrider, and Ian White, CEO of Urban Mapping and moderated by industry veteran Dana Todd currently CMO of Newsforce (and SEMPO board member).
Zack Anderson took the stage first and provided an outline of their efforts as an online tickets vendor to reach local and mobile customers. It is a pet peeve of mine (and I know I’m not alone in this) when speakers agree to come to an event, but then hold back the specifics of their experience for fear of giving away their trade secrets. Zack did not do that.
Zack outlined how TicketCity has moved a significant portion of their budget away from physical Yellow Pages buys, towards local targeted online buys. These buys have generally focused on Internet Yellow Pages (IYPs) and local-targeted campaigns through the major networworks like Google and Yahoo!. Currently 75% of their revenues are driven by their online efforts, including sponsorships and organic traffic.
One mobile side, they are still in the experimentation stage. His advice for mobile: Get out and test, spend in moderation, and monitor how the medium evolves.
Sean Cummings of Ask.com provided a fast run down of tactics for local marketers to better leverage search. Among his recommendations:
- If you have local content, make sure your site structure reflects that content (e.g. URLs like widgets.com/ca/san-francisco). You should be able to bookmark and forward you local desitination pages, if you can’t something is wrong.
- Make sure you are properly listed in Maps (something echoed by Zack Anderson).
- Local Press Releases are a great way to generate backlinks from local media sites.
Erika Moersch went through a quick summary of how to set up a mobile search campaign. Her recommendations:
- Create a WAP site. Make sure you’re considering the mobile device expeience—meaning plan for fast load times, and screenspace constraints.
- Choose the right keywords for your campaign. They’ve found that more general keywords actually perform better for mobile, than for normal search. So, broaden your targets
- On a technical point: plan for on-deck and off-deck style WAP sites. They use a 75/25 on vs. off rule of thumb.
- Plan for creative limitations. Emphasize the title in your sponsored listings, and know that only the top 1/2 listings will typically be seen in the mobile environment.
Among roadblocks for marketers - Poor support for Flash and Java, only 13% of mobile phones are smartpohones, search for mobile is generally not as good for mobile users, ther is a lack of standardization in platform and domain/subdomain naming (m., .mobi, .wap), and difficulties tracking mobile response.
Erika’s bottom line: Mobile is expected to grow by 4200% in the next few years, so get out there and test now so you can be ready later.
The final panelist, Ian White, began with some stats they had pulled from the leaked 2006 AOL search data as they relate to local search. What they found:
- 40% of queries are inherently local (for a local product, destination or service—“plumber” vs. something general like “books”).
- 5% of search terms use a city and or state
- 2% of search terms use informal location space descriptions like neighborhoods
- 0.05% of searches contain a zip code
From this data IAN shows that searchers use informal space names 40x more than location modifiers like zip codes. Well, guess what Ian’s company provides? Wait for it…a web services tool that allows you to identify informal space location names. I think it is likely that zip code searches have increased since that AOL data was leaked, but nevertheless, the Urban Mapping neighborhood service (one of several they provide) does sound interesting.
Ian also gave a warning about putting too much faith in IP based GeoTargeting—it sucks no matter what your providers says, the data is generally bad and unreliable.
This kind of practical, down to earth, duscussion seems to be one of the trends of this year’s Ad:Tech. Less focus on pretty creative and broad statements, more focus on nuts and bolts—a positive change.
Is it Fine written. Positive certainly comes short, but read on one breathing. Tnx
By blog warez on 2008 11 06
uk adult dating http://adultdatinguk.smut.com
By sex dating on 2008 11 12
Today communication resource are developing is day by day and this should be a great impact.
Home Business Opportunity
By Home Business Opportunity on 2008 11 19
