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Why Do Birds Suddenly Appear?
By Cameron Ferroni | February 18, 2008
Sorry folks, but I’m going to repeat a couple of themes here, mostly in my everlasting attmept to try to convince you that some of my ideas and assertions make sense. I spent last weekend in Bend, OR, taking advantage of some beautiful weather and doing some skiing. As some of you know, my wife is a bit of a foodie (actually she’s a professional food photographer as well, so the foodie thing is as much a career as it is a passion), and so we tend to seek out places off the beaten path to eat/try when we are away.
This trip the destination was a place called The Sparrow Bakery - a cool little organic bakery tucked away in a rather industrial district near downtown Bend. To be safe, just before we left our hotel for lunch, I popped online to see where the place was, rather than just stumbling around downtown (good that I did - note my mention earlier that it was “tucked away” in an “industrial district” - i.e. we would never had stumbled across it.)
In any case, as I popped through a couple of different places on the Web, I was surprised at the ads that were delivered. On some sites, I received no ads. I guess that makes sense, since it is unlikely that anyone out there is buying the keywords “sparrow” and “bakery” together. On others I received ads for sparrows - some bird related, some related to other businesses with sparrow in their name. This makes less sense as a user, but I can see how it happened from a technology perspective. But what struck me again was the missed opportunity here. I knew I was looking for a bakery and many of the sites knew I was looking for a bakery, since I was in their restaurants or bakeries category. And yet none of them actually provided relevant ads to do with bakeries, or even food. Heck, they could have just had ads for Bend, OR at a city level and that would have made more sense than showing nothing, or showing ads for birds….
My point? An echoing of points I’ve made before. First off humans are smarter than computers - the sooner we can figure out how to take advantage of this, the better off our systems will be. Secondly, keyword based bidding has its place, but there is a wealth of opportunity that we are leaving on the table by ignoring category bidding and by ignoring user intent….
Topics: Local Search |
February 19th, 2008 at 10:59 am
I think what you experienced as a user conducting this niche search in this small community is a look back within the business of search in general. This market is really just a reflection of content, competition and usage.
Three years ago, these were the typical results not just in Bend, but across the entire U.S. Local algorythmic search had not evolved from either an advertiser or usage perspective. IYP was the dominant player - and in many cases still provides the most complete, accurate and geo-specific search results. I would hope The Sparrow Bakery is at least listed!
There is no reason this or any other local business should not be found online. In Bend, it’s quite possible a substaintial search marketing investment is not yet required, unless you want to market your services outside of your local area. The locally dominant IYP, Google Maps and Yahoo Local are no-brainers, but as you illustrated there is a very learning curve for SMB’s in most markets.
Humans are still smarter than computers - but I can’t wait for that to change!