The Bottom Line: Facebook Ads are the most versatile, targeted way to advertise online, and they have incredible reach.

Challenges with Facebook Advertising

• Banner Blindness
• You have to hire a graphic artist to make all the ad creatives

Facebook Glossary:

• Connections: The number of individuals who liked your Facebook page, RSVP’d to your event, or installed your app within 24 hours of seeing your ad or sponsored story. Basically, a connection is a conversion.
• Unique Reach: The number of individual people who saw your sponsored stories or ads.
• Social Reach: The number of people who saw your sponsored stories or ads because their friends liked your page, RSVP’d to your event, or used your app.
• Frequency: The average number of times each person saw your campaign’s sponsored story or ad. This is helpful for measuring ad fatigue.

Basic Ad Formats

• Basic Ads
  • “Like” ad: Links to tab on Facebook page
  • Event ad: Links to event
  • Application ad: Links to application
  • Standard ad: Links to specific URL
  • Sponsored Stories
    • Page “Like” Story: Mary-Jane likes your page, Page “like” Story lets Mary-Jane’s friends know about the like
    • Page Post Story: You published a post to your page’s fans. Page Post Story allows this post to show up in fans’ news feeds
    • Pages Post “Like” Story; Alex liked one of your page posts in the last 7 days. Page Post “like” Story lets Alex’s friends know about the post like
    • App Used and Game Played Story: Lauren played/used your game or app. App Used/Game Played Story tells her friends about this action
    • App Share Story: Hayes shared a story from your app in the last 7 Days. App Share Story lets Hayes’ friends know about the share
    • Check-in Story: Lisa checked in or claimed a deal using Facebook Places. Check-in Story lets Lisa’s friends know about it.
    • Domain Story: Mike liked/shared content from your website or pasted a link from your site to his wall. Domain Story lets Mike’s friends know about this action.

The complexity and potential of targeting on Facebook

• There are so many ways of targeting that it can be confusing
  • Age, likes, interests, birthday, apps, education, timeline content, friends, event RSVPs, fans
  • When choosing targets, focus on two things:
    • Narrowing your audience
      • Demo and Geo Targeting
        • Geography: Country, State, Province, City or Zip targeting
        • Demographics: Gender, Age, Birthday, Relationship Status, Language
        • Workplace and Education Targeting
          • Workplace, Education, Preferred Language
        • Likes and Interests Targeting
          • Favorite TV Shows, Movies, Books, Music, Hobbies, Religion, Political Views
• Thinking outside the box – Let’s say you want to sell golf clubs
  • Nick (who plays golf) is an obvious target
  • Barbara doesn’t like golf – but she likes the Palm Beach Country Club
  • Chaz doesn’t have the word golf anywhere on his profile, but he plays golf for a living: he’s a sales guy!
  • Try the obvious targets, but Facebook’s best advertisers use non-linear thinking to target ads.

Campaign Organization Tips

• An “Account” in Facebook is similar to a “Campaign” in Paid Search
• A “Campaign” in Facebook is similar to “Ad Group” in Paid Search
• Warning: Don’t create campaigns with many different targets and ads. Keep your campaigns small.
• Do not put all segmented target groups in one campaign – as your ads are competing within the campaign.
• Prevent ad fatigue, or banner blindness by changing ads frequently
  • As soon as CTR trends down, submit new content!

Q&A:

What is a good CTR?

• Anywhere from 0.1-0.4 is really strong CTR, even .08% is okay
• Dennis Yu, CEO at BlitzLocal outlines 11 Killer Ways to Increase Your Facebook CTR

What images work best?

• Logos traditionally don’t work well
• Images of people are effective
• Format design keeping small size in account

What is a preferred or optimal frequency?

• Keep it small!
• 6,7,8 is bad

Any issues with click fraud?

• There is a department at Facebook dedicated to click fraud with a sophisticated monitoring team.
• More difficult to produce in Facebook than in search where you can just search to make a specific ad appear.

How will timeline affect ads/business pages?

• Yet to be determined!

Fans much more likely to take some type of action than non-fans.

Targeting workplaces is a great tool for B2B marketing.

What sort of company uses page post story? How breaking should the news be? What types of posts work best?

• Entertainment, news businesses using these most effectively
• Have emotional connection so people will click

Is there advertising on Facebook mobile?

• In testing, not released to general public yet.

Notes taken by BlitzLocal Analyst Matt Prater

Graphics obtained from: http://www.slideshare.net/TradaPaidSearch/facebook-ads-you-can-make-them-work and www.facebook.com.

Original at “Facebook Ads: You Can Make Them Work!” Webinar by Trada BlitzLocal

When I googled “social media vs. seo” (in quotes) this morning, 12,400 results were returned. Restricting the same search to only the past year, over 800 results are returned. Obviously, many people are pitting the two against one another, and have been for some time.

There’s little sense, in my mind, in postulating whether social media is better than SEO or SEO is better than social media. Making these two marketing channels adversaries is akin to pitting shirts against pants/shorts. For those people who don’t wear dresses or jumpsuits, they’ll likely be wearing a shirt and a pair of pants. Asking them which is better will probably only result in having them give you a look that implies they think you’ve lost your mind.

Cross-Channel Marketing Rules

When promoting anything, whether it’s a business, a website, a product, or a brand, promotion works best when it covers a broad spectrum of marketing channels. Television ad campaigns work best when they are reinforced by radio campaigns, magazine campaigns, newspaper campaigns, email campaigns, etc. Cross-channel marketing succeeds because the layers of reinforcing messages work together to create a connection with the target audience.

Waves of Data Engulf Users

People today are absorbing external stimuli in huge waves of data, much like a whale ingests enormous swarms of krill. It is unlikely that a whale would be able to pick out the one particular krill that tasted peculiar amongst the millions he ingested. Likewise, the data we absorb each day is so large and diverse, that recognizing and remembering one marketing message amongst the continuous data flow is rather low. It’s much easier for a lone marketing message to be lost in the flow than it would be if it were repeatedly reinforced by entering the data stream in various ways, from various places, and at various times.

Be Where They Are

The goal should always be to interact with users where they are. If they are searching via a search engine, then an SEO campaign can help reach them during that process. Of course, a PPC campaign also works hand-in-hand with SEO to cover both the organic and paid listings that are returned in the search results for the queries relevant to your brand, service, or product.

Users are spending a considerable amount of time on social networks, so a social media campaign is needed to reach them there. Like the concept of using both SEO and PPC campaigns to cover organic and paid search listings, social media campaigns will include organic interactions such as tweets, Facebook Likes and wall posts, etc., in addition to paid interactions such as promoted tweets and Facebook ad campaigns.

Value In Each Piece Reinforces Overall Value

Each channel will reach users at a different point in the marketing funnel, so the value should be calculated and compared in relation to other marketing efforts aimed at that same audience. In most cases, a search user is likely to be in one part of the marketing funnel, and a Facebook user is in another (or may even be outside of the funnel altogether). Pitting the value of an SEO campaign aimed at the search user against the value of a social media campaign aimed at the Facebook user will only result in a confusing matchup. There is value in both, with each being one important part of an entire cross-channel promotion.

Give each marketing channel its own level of respect, evaluating the effectiveness of each using data that is relevant to that particular channel. Analyze how well the campaign is working within its channel, adjust, re-analyze, adjust again, until you are satisfied that it is accomplishing the goals you set for that particular channel.

Make sure each channel’s message is consistent with the messages from other channels, so that every channel reinforces the others. As the daily influx of data streams through each person, those reinforcing messages will build upon one another and help the entire package of marketing messages stand out in the user’s mind.

The key isn’t to compare seo vs. social media, but to use the right messages in the right formats to ensure the best chance of reaching users at the right time and in the right place. The more often you can accomplish that, with consistent messaging, the more successful each campaign will be, no matter which channel it was focused upon.

Let us know if you’ve found a particular combination of cross-channel marketing especially successful, or if you’ve had problems connecting various channels to create a tight overall campaign.

Original at Social Media vs. SEO – No Contest! BlitzLocal

Let’s say that you have an offer that converts at 1%. Then you’d expect to have 1 conversion in every 100 clicks. What if 200 clicks go by and there are no conversions? Is that a sign of something bad or is that just noise?

The math of calculating statistical significance can be complicated, so I’m going to show you a short cut that comes from probability theory. If you want to go straight to the formula skip to the bottom.

Switching examples, let’s say that you flipped a coin 100 times. What is the probability that you get at least 1 head? You might want to calculate the probability of getting just 1 head in 100 tosses, add that to the probability of getting 2 heads, and so forth– all the way up to 100 heads. This is lots of math.

But did you know that the opposite of at least one is none? If you didn’t get at least 1 head, you got none. Thus, the probability of not getting a head each time you flip is 50%, so the answer is just 50% to the 100th power.

Back to our offer that converts at 1%, the probability of a click NOT converting is 99%– 100 percent minus 1 percent. Thus, the probability of not getting a conversion in X clicks is just 99% to the Xth degree. If 200 clicks go by, you would expect to see 2 conversions– but if there are none, what is the probability it’s just random noise?

Plug those numbers in and you’ll see that if an offer should convert at 1% and you see 200 clicks go by, then it’s a 13.4% chance that something is wrong and therefore a 86.6% chance that things are fine. If you change the conversion rate and number of observations, then the probability changes, too– just plug in the numbers.

Now before you set up a script to alert you to changes in conversion rates, consider that if you set the thresholds for alerts too low, you’ll get inundated with false positives– the equivalent of “crying wolf”.

So in the above case, if there’s a 13.4% chance something is actually wrong– the URL being down, the offer sucking, the ad not performing, or otherwise– and you’re running 20,000 clicks a day, then you are evaluating this test 100 times a day (200 x 100 = 20,000). Thus, you’d get alerted, on average, 13 times a day to check if something is wrong. Is that too many times for you? You decide the balance of sensitivity that’s right for you.

If your expected conversion rate is 5%, for example on dating offer, then you’d expect to see a conversion every 20 clicks. Thus, the probability you don’t have any conversions after 200 clicks is far less than if you expect 1%. In fact, the probability is 0.004%.

If you’re not a math guy or somehow got lost in all the numbers here, just use this rule of thumb. If you don’t have a conversion in 3 times as many clicks as you’d expect to get one conversion, then something is probably wrong.

So if you expect to see 1 conversion every 25 clicks, then shut things down after 75 clicks.
If you expect 1 conversion in 100 clicks, then stop after 300 clicks.

That gives you a 95% confidence interval– another way of saying that you’re reasonably sure that it’s something worth looking at.

Set your confidence interval too low and you get false positives all day.

Set it too high and you’ll burn way more inventory than you should to detect differences in conversion.

See chart below– the percentages there are the chance that the alert is due to just statistical noise. 100% minus each number is, therefore, the chance that there’s a problem. For example, if you are looking at a 2% conversion rate and 200 clicks, then there’s a 1.76% chance nothing is wrong and a 98% chance that something is out of whack.

.

If you want to discuss the formulas in more detail, just reply in the comments and I’ll do my best to get back to you.

Here’s to more profits to you!

Related Reading:

• How to use Google Conversion Optimizer in just 3 minutes
• Dennis Yu gives Facebook optimization tips for hosting companies
• GoogleAnalytics vs. Omniture: Independent Analysis
• Funeral marketing is no grave matter – Focus on conversion rates
• 11 Killer Ways to Increase Your Facebook CTR

Original at Want to Calculate the Best Conversions? BlitzLocal

Speaker: Dan Thut, Rocketer, attempts to demonstrate how to use Facebook ads to grow the volume and efficiency of a PPC campaign, using a case study.

Chris McDonagh, webcast producer/moderator of searchmarketingnow.com introduced Marc Poirier, the CMO of Acquisio. Poirier talked a little about their software and introduced Dan Thut of Rocketer.

The question many ask is can we use Facebook for lead generation? The implied answer was yes, though it was left hanging.

Facebook advertising can have some pitfalls:

1. You can spend a lot of money very quickly, with not much to show for it
2. Many challenger brands are adopting Facebook advertising at a rapid and commendable rate, so they are eating away at big brands market share because they are getting to grips with this new advertising strategy faster than the big brands are.

You need an agile team and lots of tools to handle everything thrown at you from this new medium. (This was the beginning of a subtle sales pitch).

One overlooked way that Facebook advertising can be beneficial is that a well managed Facebook ad campaign can help established a PPC campaign deliver more value and more volume.

CASE STUDY:

• Increased monthly conversions from 8k to 21k
• CPA – cost per acquisition – dropped from 23 UK pounds to 13 pounds
• 34% increase in ppc brand searches
• 47% increase in direct-to-url traffic

Rocketer already had some data that suggested that people who clicked on a Facebook ad later transacted via a comparable Google PPC ad, but they wanted to test it. They carefully chose a client to work with and made sure they had total control of client’s marketing, to ensure the numbers would be accurate and not skewed by other factors.

They tested a lot of ads, and managed them closely.

They targeted UK men aged 16-45. (12 million)

How many different ad variants are needed for 12 million users?

They broke the group down into smaller groups. 113 counties x 25 sporting interests x 15 newspaper readerships – splits the 12 million users into tens of thousands of different niche interest groups!

Obviously, to manage tens of thousands of groups, each using at least a hundred different ad variants, you need technology to handle it all. (More subtle sales pitching here).

The process: build ads specific to each niche user group, get the right message to the right person at the right time, identify the successful ad types, but don’t stop there.

It only takes one rotten apple (ad) to quickly spoil the rest. Facebook ads can degrade very quickly (CTR drops / bounce rates rise), so their quality scores get worse. That one bad infects the others in the group quickly, and a lot of bad ads can infect the entire advertising account. Within 24 hours, a few bad apples can destroy all the ads in your account.

Since Facebook doesn’t tell us the quality score of ads, we have to gauge it ourselves, which is both important and difficult. So we need to watch the successful ads like a hawk and remove the degrading ones before they affect the others. Obviously, a tool is necessary to analyze thousands of ads and alert us when bad ones crop up. (I bet you know that this refers to the sales pitch, right?).

Although the presenter showed a graph indicating that PPC spend decreased while the Facebook ad testing was going on, I can’t say he ever really explained the correlation. I don’t know how or why one affected the other, so I’m not sure I would know how to duplicate such success.

In any case, this was really more about subtly selling software than it was about educating me on how Facebook ads can augment a PPC campaign. I don’t want to imply that they overdid the sales pitches, because it really was pretty subtle, but at the end, all I really got out of this presentation was that I need tools to manage large Facebook ad campaigns.

Original at The Impact of Facebook on PPC Advertising: A Case Study – Liveblogged BlitzLocal

The summit’s 14 sessions are led by top industry experts, including Bryan Eisenberg, Co-Founder Future Now Inc., Frederick Vallaeys, product evangelist for Google, and Dennis Yu, CEO and co-founder of BlitzLocal.

As a bonus, BlitzLocal is offering free pay-per-click campaign templates for a few industry verticals for those who attend “AdWords for Local:  Sort Heads from Tails, Find Free Clicks and Calls,” which Yu is leading on March 16.

Yu will cover a number of topics including:

• how to build effective campaigns for businesses that have a local customer base
• why mobile ads are a hidden gem for lead gen on smartphones and non-smart phones alike.
• how to manage the difference between “Chicago restaurants” and “restaurants” searched from Chicago: find out how much traffic can you expect from geo-targeted search versus geo-multiplied keywords.

For more information and to save $200 by registering today, please follow the link here.

Original at Access experts at AdWords Summit series BlitzLocal

So let’s talk about how to actually get these businesses to become your clients, starting first bywhat NOT to do:

• Cold calling– Going door-to-door and walking into someone’s business is NOT cool. You are a stranger, they’re busy running their office– and most of the time you won’t even be able to get to the decision maker. The receptionist will stop you. Might as well sell magazines and charity chocolate bars, since you’re just going to get rejected. Rejection sucks– you want THEM to come to you. That allows you to set the price and puts you in a great spot. More on that in a sec.
• Spending money on PPC– Yeah, I know it’s hypocritical. You are selling PPC, but don’t do it to promote yourself. The reason you don’t is the same as cold calling– selling SUCKS. You spend money, waste your time, and have to deal with rejection. And that’s just more marketing cost you have to pass on to the clients.
• Building the most awesome, informative website about your services– Let me tell you something. You don’t even need to have a website! “But what if they want to see my website?”
  you ask. Tell them that you’re so busy serving clients first that your site is still in progress. Clients first, see?
• Giving away services for cheap or free: Someone probably told you that if you’re just getting started and don’t have a client list, then you need to do the first few for cheap to build up a portfolio. That’s complete nonsense. Most prospects won’t ask you, for example, about other Italian restaurants or veterinarians that you’ve done. Discounting your services devalues you in the client’s eyes, plus will make you unmotivated to work hard for so little money.
• Talking about how well you know PPC, SEO, social media, etc: Seems counter-intuitive, right? They’re a business owner, not another affiliate. The more you sprinkle acronyms into your language, the more you’re losing them. You’re not speaking their language. I almost never mention the word PPC to clients. Instead, I say “I couldn’t find your name on Google. But we can get you to show up if you let us advertise on Google for you.”

So those are the 5 most common ways to fail at selling and getting new clients. There are a few companies in the local space– VC-funded monsters that have tens or hundreds of millions of funding to blow on these techniques. But if we’re talking about YOUR money, then focus on what actually works.

And now the secret to how to sell local clients….

You ready?

…
…
…

The secret is that you don’t sell– you let others sell for you because of your reputation. So you get clients by building up your reputation.

Put on a seminar at the local chamber of commerce or networking event– if you can charge $15 each, even better. Not because you need the money, but because it makes folks who attend take you seriously. Every one of the 5 mistakes mentioned above degrades and devalues your offering– it turns you into a panderer instead of a highly sought after expert.

In the course of every day life, you will run into people who are small business owners. There’s 20 million of them– how can you not? And when you’re talking to friends about how Google works– which we do all the time to folks who don’t understand what we do– you’re equipping others to sell your services.

And each friend of yours has perhaps 100 friends that they talk to and will mention that you’re an expert on getting people on Google. So you should almost never take on a project from a friend– but you should definitely consider taking on a project from a friend of a friend. A friend will expect a “good friend” discount, while a “weak tie” (friend of a friend) will not. Plus the number of people that you are connected to 2 steps away is 100 times larger than those just 1 step away.

And when those people come knocking, because a friend told them that you’re a Google expert, then you run them through this process:

• What do you want to show up on Google for?
• Let’s do a search and see who is there now.
• It’s going to cost between $1,000 and $5,000 a month to advertise on Google– depending on how much market share you want. Shall we start with $1,000 a month for a couple months to see how we do?
• We can track exactly how our ads are doing- how many visitors click on the ads and then how many calls result from that. That allows us to calculate the cost per call. You’ll probably be between $40 and $100 a call, depending on the competition. We’ll have to test.
• And from there, we can adjust the ads based on what kinds of clients you want (more laser hair removal, and less botox? Sure).
• We will place a phone number on the website that is only on the web, just for tracking, which bounces to your regular number.
• No website? We can make a minisite for you.
• Sign here and gimme your credit card.

If they don’t get that, whine about cost, or complain, then don’t push the issue. You have a number of other interested clients that you have to get back to. You don’t want bad clients. There are so many local businesses out there that you can have your pick– and that includes the competitors of the guys who aren’t really interested in your online advertising service.

So there you have it. No need to deal with rejection. Don’t have to spend a lot of money or build a site. Just have to casually talk about getting onto Google with your friends, who then spread the word for you. And then you walk those friends of friends via the process I’ve just laid out.

The hardest part is the first few weeks to build your reputation. You might feel like an imposter if you haven’t done it before. Take heart that local PPC is not the hard part, nor is listing clients with Google and BING Local Business Center. Just remember that you’re competing against the other local dentists and massage therapists- not thousands of affiliates worldwide.

And once you have a few of them down, then these clients tell their friends— and soon you have a thriving business of people who are seeking you out. You just have to sit back, take the calls, and decide which of them you want. Doesn’t sound like selling does it?

Now managing clients, building sites, setting up call tracking, billing credit cards automatically, and so forth is a whole different set of issues– I’ll write another post on that if people want to hear it. But as for selling, it’s easy when you let others sell for you.

Original at How to sell local clients BlitzLocal

Dennis will provide the same workshop at the PPC Summit in Chicago, Illinois (Nov 4-5, 2009).

Dennis’s Workshop will focus on answering the following important questions:

• Local search is attracting a great deal of press for its ability to provide targeted leads for smaller businesses, but is it right for you?
• What local opportunities are out there?
• Where should you focus your money and attention?
• If you can see the world locally, can you also see it globally?
• Do you see international opportunities for your business in this global search marketing economy?

The workshop will delve into opportunities that will drive your business forward, both near and far.

Original at Events: Local & International PPC Opportunities BlitzLocal

Here at BlitzLocal we implement many different tools to bring our clients the most business via the internet as possible. Among other tools, we customize  Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns to better suit our client needs. Many advertisers will reference PPC as common knowledge, but if the client is unfamiliar there’s no reason to let it slide.  I will be covering PPC basics so that there is no guessing involved, and we can all feel a little more informed.

First allow me to define some common terms heard in Pay Per Click.

Pay Per Click (PPC) – Advertisers pay a provider for certain keywords when their ad is clicked.
Cost Per Click (CPC) – The amount advertisers pay for each to bring one visitor to a website.
Keyword – A specific term that is searched on the internet. For example, a dentist would pay for the keyword “root canal”.
Bidding - Advertisers competitively bid on certain keywords relevant to their target market to advantage the client .

How to build a PPC campaign

Here is a basic example of how to build a PPC campaign. For this example I will use a local Denver Cosmetic Surgeon.  

First, we need to determine who the target market is. Using the cosmetic surgeon example, people searching for cosmetic surgery will be our target market.
Second, we create subcategories of our parent category. A Cosmetic Surgeon can do a number of procedures, the procedures we want to target for more business. Some subcategories for a Cosmetic Surgeon would be Botox, Laser Hair Removal, Face Lifts, Breast Augmentation, and Chemical Peels.
Finally, given all subcategories we can create keywords.  Keywords are specific to each subcategory.  Some keywords for the subcategory Botox may be “botox procedure”, “facial botox”, “botox doctor”.

When we are done building our keywords for the PPC campaign, the end product will look like this.

Parent Category: Cosmetic Surgery > Subcategory: Botox > Keyword: botox procedure
Parent Category: Cosmetic Surgery > Subcategory: Botox > Keyword: facial botox
Parent Category: Cosmetic Surgery > Subcategory: Botox > Keyword: botox doctor

Pay Per Click and Cost Per Click

Pay Per Click refers to paying a PPC provider such as Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and Microsoft adCenter for certain keywords.  Obviously PPC campaigns are not free, so we must optimize spending to create the most efficiency when it comes to bringing in new visitors. Bidding on keywords measures the greatest efficiency. Weed out the bad keywords and invest in the ones producing results.  When it comes to bidding there are plenty of options, but an Analyst report stats and give you need-to-know information.

Thank you for reading the basics of Pay Per Click on the BlitzLocal blog. If this has interested you please look forward to a 12 Week Series on PPC coming in September.  With Scott Richter’s all around expertise prepare to have your PPC socks knocked off.

Original at Want to Build Effective Local PPC Campaigns? BlitzLocal

Below, I’ve included important PowerPoint slides along with some observations from the webcast.

Key Findings:

Interactive media advertising cannot and will not grow forever.

A regular problem with small business is that they don’t want to spend much, have high demands and unfortunately are not very good about paying their bills.

There is currently massive churn in Local Search Advertising. Based off of Borrell’s findings the average situations is that if a Local Search Firm sold 12,000 accounts in a given year they would likely finish the year with 247 total active accounts! Key factors of the high churn rate include: Local Search is oversold. On top of that not enough of the client’s money is going to buying PPC. Finally, dealing with small businesses is proportionately far too time-consuming—they need a lot of hand holding, even on small buys. (See Slide 14)

Typically, the lower the spend the less money is spent on actual keywords buys—a lot of the money goes towards commissions and overhead. (Slide 15)

Firms that use Search Engine Marketing Management Software see lower churn rate. Sophisticated software helps make management of PPC much easier and more consistent. (Slide 16)

There is a direct correlation between the amount spent on ad buys and the amount of churn—the more money spent on ad buys the lower the churn, the more spent on commissions and overhead the higher the churn. (Slide 17)

Studies have shown that actually increasing percentage of spend on ad buys not only delivers better results for the client, but it also delivers higher profits over time for the Local Search Marketing Firm.

Most small advertisers have the nagging feeling that half the advertising they are doing is working and half of it is not, the only trouble is that they’re not sure which half is the one that is working (Borell calls that the John Wannamaker Syndrome). That means that they are vulnerable to being persuaded either towards or away from different types of advertising. At the end of the day, Local Advertising is based off of trust; if you can convince them to trust you they will buy, but your service damn well better perform.

Many local advertisers have not yet tried Local Search Marketing, however many of them are constantly getting contacted by local search advertisers (some times as much as once per week!). That means that perhaps Local Search Advertising Businesses have NOT yet found the right pitch. There is an opportunity for search businesses if they can find a simple pitch that hits the right nerve.

Local Search Advertisers need to understand the sorts of questions their small business clients will have—they’ll want to know how much money will be spent on what, they will want guaranteed results and they will want a monthly report that they can understand (not just a Google Analytics report with a different logo).

A lot of PPC people out there don’t know what they’re doing, so the caveat here is that increasing ad buy spend may not get performance as high as it needs to be. Spending more money inefficiently won’t get you any further. You have to have both—high percentage of overall money going to ad buys and talented people managing the campaigns. Also, talent may not be enough; they need to use sophisticated tools.

This means that the perfect situation is one where you have a high percentage of client spend dedicated to ad buys (60% minimum, and 65% is better!), along with experienced and talented analysts managing these accounts with the help of sophisticated Search Engine Marketing Management Software.

A regular question Borrell gets, given the tremendous amount of churn he talks about, is:

How many times will small businesses fail the first time around, but retry local search at a later date?

His answer: The fact is that there is currently no strongly conclusive data here, but based off of some recent research the belief is that many of them will come back. One of the reasons is that not all churn is due to people being unsatisfied—some people only pursue seasonable campaigns; others have like to run tests and then evaluate the results over a period of time before deciding whether to re-engage.

One last thought from Borrell: Local Advertising is Sold, not Bought—SMBs need to be pursued, and the right pitch along with a tight system that produces results will win them and keep them happy.

Remember: BlitzLocal devotes 70% of the client’s spend towards Ad Buys and we have talented PPC professionals running the campaigns! Use BlitzLocal for a competitive advantage!

Original at Review: The Economics of Local Search Advertising Webcast BlitzLocal