Convert Offline

At Christmas I got a Droid. That’s good.

I had 10 months left on my T-mobile contract. That’s good for you.

Here’s the offer. You get the G1 for free. You need to agree to take over my contract.

What’s in it for you:

• Free G1
• Contract Expires in October, so you are only locked in for 10 mos., NOT 2 years like me!
• The phone is awesome, only slightly less awesome than the droid

What’s in it for me:

• I get my $200 T-mobile penalty back

Contract Details:

The contract is $49.00/mo for 400 minutes on T-Mobile. With that you have access to the internet on wifi, phone, music player. Kind’ve like an ipod touch with Gmail and a phone.
Optional: Add $30 month for data plan to get on 3g.

If you need any addt’l info you can ask in the comments below. If you’re interested please use the contact form near the bottom of this page.

Last week Google formally launched its Click-to-Call functionality in Adwords. Greg Sterling spoke with Paul Feng, Google’s Group Product Manager for Mobile Ads, about this new feature. Feng said that some advertisers in Google’s Click-to-Call tests saw improvement in CTR’s up to 30%, compared to ads on the PC. Sterling goes on to hypothesis that the local number provides additional credibility, making the user more inclined to click or call.

I share Sterling’s theory about the power of a local number in CTR. We’ve been including local numbers in service business ads for some time now, and they consistently outperform ads without numbers. Sure, with the numbers in we have less room for creative, but if CTR is better it’s a no brainer.

So after reading that Google made Click-to-Call functional we set it up for a garage door repair company in Las Vegas. We thought Click-to-Call would be a pretty good thing for them. Mobile users in Las Vegas looking to repair the garage door would be able to call for service right away, no need to go through the website.

So we followed Googles “2 Simple Steps” for setting this up:

1)Set up location extensions and add your business phone number. Customers will be able to click to call your business location nearest to them (as determined by the phone’s location awareness technologies, GPS, triangulation).
2)Check that you’ve chosen to show your ads on iPhones and other mobile devices with full Internet browsers in your campaign settings.

After making these simple changes to your campaign settings, you should see something resembling the picture above.

Split Your Campaign Into PC and Mobile

We decided to split our campaigns into two groups: One for just mobile, and one for just Desktops.
This way we can tailor the content of the ad and their landing pages to the mobile user. Plus we want to see just how effective these ads are against the regular ones.

Anyway, we set everything up and then pulled out our iPhones and Droids to test it. Here’s what we saw.

The click to call number wasn’t displaying! The address was showing, so we knew we got it right. What happened?

How come my address shows in my ads, but my phone number is missing?

We double and triple checked our settings and ads. Everything was set up correctly, but why wasn’t the phone number displaying? The AdWords Help page wasn’t useful, offering only the advice to make sure you haven’t set up custom targeting to show an address with the ad. We hadn’t.

We finally threw in the towel and contacted AdWords support. Here’s the answer we got:

So if you’re having the same problem getting your Click-to-Call numbers displaying, don’t worry. Google just needs time to catch up.

Guest Post by Chris Keenan.
Chris Keenan is a PPC Account Manager at A2Opinion, a local search marketing agency.

Over the weekend I had my first sighting of the new Google Product Listing Ads.
Having missed all the write-ups last week I was shocked when they showed up in a search I was doing over the weekend.

Visually dominant and uber-relevant, these ads dominated my attention as a search marketer and someone looking for an above ground pool.

Screen cap of my first sighting and interaction with a Google Product Listing Ad.

Google continues to expand the types of searches for which it displays the 10-Pack. Today for the first time I found the 10 pack for a search with a county geography.

In the light of Borrell Associates recent study that showed astronomical churn rates at local search resellers like Yodle and ReachLocal, there has been a lot of speculation about the reasons why. I commented on David Mihm’s Blog that price is a big issue and how much they charge is still unknown.

Andrew Shotland, a a well respected seo, speculated on that same post that cost was probably between 30% – 50% of spend.

Here is what 2 customers of a prominent reseller told me:

I told them I wouldn’t do business with them until they told me how much they charged. I knew they weren’t doing it for free so I pressed. They still wouldn’t tell me and I continued to press until finally they got a manager who told me “We get the clicks at a discount from Google, so you would be paying the same thing as if you did it on your own”

That last statement sent my eyebrows up to the ceiling. The customer asked me if I could find out for him whether it is true or not. I told him that I would put out to the community.

I would like your opinion please help by commenting below.

Do you believe that some resellers get a lower price on clicks from Google and make their money on that spread?

Greg Sterling has been writing a lot about the possible disappearance of newspapers.

Seth Godin has also speculated about newspapers’ disappearance.

I think both of them and others are talking about them because they feel like it is really important; but what about yellow pages. Does anyone care? Until yesterday I thought so.

Now I believe people who use the internet on a regular basis believe yellow pages are irrelevant. What changed my mind?

Late Thursday it was reported by the Dallas Business Journal

Idearc Inc., a provider of consumer information that includes phone directories, posted a fourth-quarter loss of $77 million on sales of $709 million, and said in notes attached to the earnings statement that it is “currently considering a restructuring” under federal bankruptcy laws.

The company, headquartered at Dallas Fort Worth International Airport, said that based on current forecasts and year-end results, it is out of compliance with one lender’s agreement and risks being out of compliance with a second.

As a result, lenders have the right to consider all the company’s debt in default and could call it due within 30 days.

You would think this would be big news and people would come to Google and type in ‘Idearc Bankruptcy’ to learn more about this huge story. Well, another post on this blog happens to rank #1 for that very term and I was just looking over the analytics and thought I would share them with you.

This screenshot shows the network location of the folks who were reading the Idearc Bankruptcy post yesterday. As you can see, only 126 views… a big yawn, right? But even more telling is that most of the views were from inside the yellow page industry and more than one-third came from Idearc and Verizon. Folks who may lose their job tend to care, what surprised me, was how few other people did.

I don’t believe people care that much if a single yellow page provider goes out business.

In the mid 60’s, the word ’screw’ and the phrase’hump the hostess’ were said in the film ‘Whose Afraid Of Virgina Wolf?.’ People freaked out and the Movie Ratings system was born and from it sprang the porn industry.

Earlier in that decade, the surgeon general wrote a report asserting that cigarettes caused lung cancer and congress passed a law requiring manufacturers to a put a warning label on their product. This shielded these companies from liability for years and allowed the cigarette industry to just keep growing.

Later the music industry was required to label their music and today there is more foul and explicit language in music than when I was a kid. Why? Because bands that had stronger warning labels on their CD sold more, and so it became… be explicit or be obscure. The result is explicit language is almost a requirement today.

Doesn’t it feel like enough time has passed since the TV and Video game rating systems that they’re going to come after something else?

Search Engine Land has an article about a new web based tool that helps small business owners to take the first step in Local Search – claiming their business profiles, getlisted.org.

You just enter the name of your business and the zip and the tool will tell you whether or not you have claimed your listing in google, yahoo, msn and botw and if you have not the link to claim it is right there to help you get started.

Well worth a look.

Chris Silver Smith wrote a post on saving the yellow pages over at Search Engine Land last week. He outlined 10 points that could help the yellow pages industry. Though I have tremendous respect for Chris Silver Smith I disagreed with almost each point he made. This post is about his first point:

1. Come up with some way to stop distributing books to people who no longer use them. There’s no way to explain to people why they should be getting these if they don’t use the books, and it irritates the environmentally-conscious even if the books are printed on recycled paper like you’ve been telling everyone.

This one I disagreed with because the ability to opt out of phone book delivery has been around for over a year now and the cynic in me believes that most people care about the environment only when it is convenient for them so nobody took the time to do it.

Then I did a search on the internet and couldn’t find the number to call and no one commented on his blog post like… Hey Chris, diid you know that you could do that for over a year now! So I was forced to consider the possibility that no one knows about this or how easy it is to do.

So, let’s find out. Here are the numbers to opt out of Yellow Page delivery for each major publisher. Is Chris right? Will the environmentally-conscious take the time to call? Or was the cynic in me right all along?

Idearc 1 800 888 8448 Option 2 (Opt Out Of Verizon Yellow Pages)
At&t 1 800 922 0008 Option 3 (Opt Out Of the Real Pages)
Dex 1 877 243 8339 (This will also work for Embarq)
Yellow Book 1 800 888-8448 Option 2

The funny part about this is how cleverly the phone companies disguised these numbers. Each one is published in their own directory as the number to call to order a phone book. I swear you can’t make this stuff up.

I would also like to assert that just because I disagree with what he wrote on that one post in no way diminishes how much respect I have for Chris Silver Smith as a leader in the local search industry. A lot of what I know about local search I learned reading his blog.

In future posts I will discuss the other 9 points.

Will Scott, a search marketer in New Orleans, who I’ve met online, emailed me yesterday asking me if there was a way we could talk. “IM? Twitter?

That email was sent around 10:30am, I responded “not really” at around 3 because that was the first time I checked my email since early in the morning. So, the combination of the content of his message along with my inability to respond quickly has woke me up to the need to get more social.

So last night I got the kids down and joined twitter and despite feeling a little awkward I twatted tweeted my first tweet.

Now, feeling empowered and ready to move forward… what’s next?

LinkedIN? Facebook? (oh! Dear God no, not Facebook), maybe I just better start with a few IM accounts and have my 9 year-old teach me how to aggregate them.

I would like to follow some of the local bloggers I read most often including , Miriam Ellis, Mike Blumenthal and David Mihm but I couldn’t find them in the people search or they had me pre-emptively blocked

Any other tips to help me get more social in 2009, please let me know. Especially any tips that help me understand how you find the time to be social online.