SEM Help For Local Service Businesses
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?
The analytics of local search are different than e-commerce; avg. time on site, pages/visit & bounce rate are largely measures of engagement and e-commerce. Yet, us local searcherati try to fit these square pegs into our round holes. Why? Because these are the tools Google Analytics made available to us.
Let’s face it, we never considered these metrics prior to the GA installation, and then after we hooked up GA, we had to do searches on Google just to find out what these terms meant. And now we use these terms as if they are truly meaningful. Well no more! It’s time to add a 12th internet marketing skill…
From now on we are going to use only the metrics that we can tie directly to revenue and profitably. I know that’s boring when compared with exciting things like “engagement”, believe me I know, I love it when you talk that way. However, times being what they are we must consider the more practical aspect of dollars actually going into our pocket.
Here are the Ratios and Metrics I’m going to watch from now on.
Clicks to Phone Calls Ratio. This measures your sites ability to get people who are interested in your service to call for an appointment or request a free estimate or some thing like that. Whatever the equivalent is in your company you know.
For service businesses, your website’s main job, perhaps its only job is to generate phone calls. Yet, I bet very few people are actually measuring this right now. This will helps us measure the effectiveness of our most basic internet marketing skills, keyword analysis, copywriting and website design.
% Calls Booked- This measures your ability to convert phone calls into appointments or estimates.
As a former Yellow Page rep I can remember telling clients over and over again, “All we can do is make your phone ring.” But now as part of the service we provide, we listen to our clients web calls and provide feedback.
This metric is far easier to take action on then avg time on site or the others to which we typically pay attention and the opportunity is tremendous, really. To fully comprehend the power of this metric, imagine raising booking % from 40% to 60 %. This is not a 20% increase… it is a full 50% increase in the amount of leads your generating and you didn’t need to spend anymore on advertising to generate it!
Closing % – this measures your company’s ability to turn leads into customers
Because of this metric’s proximity to actually collecting money it is already pretty well regarded by most; but I would venture there is still some room for improvement.
Avg Sale $ – What is the average sale?
Don’t leave home without this one and definitely don’t talk to any advertising people without knowing it.
Profit Margin%- the percent of each sale that goes into your pocket.
I think of this number as the dollars that make it into your pocket on your last sale— expressed as a percentage.
Focusing on and improving these stats can help you stretch your advertising dollar and bring in more sales. Which is why we pay attention to analytics in the first place. Imagine logging into your analytics package and seeing the number of unique phone calls you generated expressed as a percentage of unique visitors. Next you see the % of these calls that were booked and finally how many turned into customers and how much was spent. I see this as being the default analytics package of the near future for local service businesses. The tools are actually available for this right now, it’s just a matter of putting them together.
*Here’s a little secret: If you get the numbers for your company for each of the 5 metrics above and multiply them, it will give you the single most important number in your entire internet marketing campaign… more on that next time.
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.
Displayed is the network location of the people who read a previous post speculating on Idearc's Bankruptcy
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.
Where can you buy a company that generated $377 million in cash after expenses in the first 9 months of this year for a total of $14.6 million? Check your local yellow pages.
Though Idearc has not made any announcement regarding bankruptcy, in the last year and half Idearc’s (publisher of the Verizon yp and superpages.com) stock has dropped from $35 to around 10 cents a share. The company has 146 million outstanding shares of stock, which means you could pick up a company that does about $3 billion in revenue with fat margins for just over $14 million. Usage of the yellow pages is still relatively strong at over 12 billion look-ups last year.
So, why would a company that is so cash rich be facing bankruptcy? Well, when Verizon spun it off in 2006 it sent it away with 9 billion dollars in debt. (Which sounds a little shady to me). So, it would seem the logical thing to do now would be to file bankruptcy, pay off the debtors at a few cents on the dollar and reorganize.
But they may cause a whole other problem. In this headline driven world, everyone is going to hear only that the yellow pages is bankrupt. And everyone will think they ran out of money because no one is using it anymore. Then people will think they now NEED to use the internet to get information when making a local purchase decision. Then the yellow pages will be bankrupt for real.
Idearc better think long and hard about the public relations end of any bankruptcy.
If Idearc does file bankruptcy it could void their intellectual property agreement with Verizon.
Under the Intellectual Property Agreement, Verizon Services also agreed not to
grant any licenses to use specified intellectual property to any person who
competes directly with Verizon or Idearc Media. The Intellectual Property
Agreement is terminable by Verizon Services only in the event of Idearc Media’s
bankruptcy, or in an event of default by Idearc Media.
I would not be surprised if they are in negotiations with Verizon right now over this and this may be what’s been keeping them from filing thus far.
