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Local Search in 2008
By John Keister | February 27, 2008
The following excerpt was written by John Keister and was recently included in Avenue A’s 2008 Digital Outlook report. In this year’s report, Avenue A has dedicated a section to educating marketers on the local search opportunity. This further validates that leading agencies and marketers are beginning to realize the value of incorporating local or geo-targeting into their online advertising campaigns. You can download the full report here. Also, Jeff Lanctot, SVP of Media for Avenue A will provide additional commentary on the report at his personal blog, www.jefflanctot.com.
Consumers are increasingly relying on local search to make important decisions on goods and services. In fact, more than 80% of search engine users search for local products and services (from where to buy a plasma TV to selecting the best home insurance provider), and more than 90% of the transactions resulting from these searches are completed offline. In response to this shift of consumer behavior, marketers are increasing their local online advertising budgets. Spending is projected to grow from $8 billion in 2007 to nearly $20 billion in 2011, equaling the $20 billion spent on total online ad billings in 2007.
Over the past few years, we have seen marketers tailor their online advertising to local consumers through geo-targeted search campaigns. In 2008, marketers of all sizes will continue to target their campaigns locally, but they will augment these campaigns by taking the logical next step: employing more sophisticated tracking and optimization technologies to measure and expand their presence in local markets.
For example, a company such as Geico can optimize the performance of their motorcycle insurance ads that are geo-targeted to Southern California by employing call-tracking, allowing them to measure the effectiveness of campaigns and length of phone calls, map phone calls to transactions, and capture information on missed calls. With call-tracking, Geico can measure the number of transactions they generated over the telephone from several advertising campaigns simultaneously, and they can measure the effectiveness of each publisher, search engine, and target market involved in their campaign.
The local Internet offers outstanding growth opportunities for national marketers and agencies. The ability to track, measure, and optimize specific online campaigns by location will make local online advertising a foundational component of many marketers’ advertising plans in 2008.
Topics: National advertisers, Local Search, Advertising |