Convert Offline

I’ve been seeing more and more local campaigns set up on search engines with no local phone number. The only number on these sites is a 1-800#… I assume this is done for analytics… and it is a bad idea in my opinion. Let me show you why.

Open up your Yellow Pages and flip through it… c’mon, I know you have one… and look for ads that have 800#’s. I’ll bet you find very few.

Do you know why?



Applying this YP concept to your Website should crank up
conversion, while providing ‘local seo’ benefit. (addt’l locations)

All the studies shows that people prefer calling local numbers and that having only an 800 number in an ad will significantly reduce call volume. If 800#’s worked better, the Yellow Pages would be loaded with them, after all, at one time both products were sold by the same company.

Want to take it one step further; check this out from YP Commando:

Research on over 77,000 Yellow Pages ads using metered telephone lines found that ads with multiple local phone numbers received many more calls than ads with only one local number.

Ads with only a single toll-free number received the fewest calls. Having both local and toll free tends to increase call counts slightly.

So, if you believe that you can apply lessons learned in local advertising from yellow pages to the web… and I firmly do - STOP using 800#’s in your local website for the sake of analytics. Use local numbers instead, and use many.

SEM Clubhouse wrote a very good post on Expanded Broad Match being Corrupt Since Aug 20th and I agree when he says “Broad Match was expanded way too much.” I will share with you 2 experiences that convince me he is right and what I plan to do about it.

A couple of weeks ago I did a search on Google that included a geographic indicator and a keyword. I used a county for the geography and to my surprise an ad that I managed and knew for sure did not target that county was returned. I got nervous, how many counties are there in the state? Is this ad coming up in every county in NJ?

No, just the one that neighbors the county targeted. That made me feel like it was calculated by Google, they could, in effect, double the amount of times the ad was served without going to far (pun intended). To be fair, this county never showed up in my analytics. But the whole thing left me feeling a little unsettled.

What I find even more convincing is the result of the query: Red House Painter -

When doing the keyword research for a local house painter earlier in the year, I found a large number of queries for ‘red house painter.’ Hmmmm…. is there a class of painters that will only paint your house red? As it turns out… no. Red House Painter is the name of a rock group and a popular search term. I certainly did not want the ad returned for this query, so I added it as a negative keyword and did one other thing…

I searched the phrase ‘Red House Painter’ in Google and found there were no Painting Contractor ads. Then I did the same search in Yahoo and found many contractors “advertising” for this term. I was left thinking how much smarter Google was in returning relevant ads. But now I find Service Magic, a contractor referral service, is appearing in the Google’s results. So, either Service Magic changed their campaign to target this search term (highly doubtful) or there was a change in Google’s algo. A change that was certainly to the detriment of Service Magic.

The 2 actions local Google advertisers should take:

1) Duplicate your most important broad match search terms using exact match or if you have the time… all of them. This will maintain your CTR and placement for these queries.

2) Put together an exhaustive list of negative keywords for broad matched terms and update it at least seasonally. Include neighboring towns and counties in which you do not want the ad to show.

What I would not do… is abandon broad matched search terms in a local campaign. There are too many variables when you add geography to the search term and I see too many very relevant queries showing up in the analytics that I would not have captured with exact match.

The other thing for you to consider is whether or not this is a “bad thing”. For those who are aware of this and are willing to work harder, you can gain an advantage on your competition.