Working With a Net, but No Wires

On-the-go Internet users are an attractive demographic.

According to a new study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 34% of Internet users have connected using a wireless network.

And 27% of Internet users have connected wirelessly from someplace other than home or work.

Why should online marketers care how people get online?

For starters, wireless users are more frequent Internet users: 72% of wireless users check e-mail on the typical day, compared with 63% of home broadband users and 54% of all Internet users.

In addition, 46% of wireless users get news online during the typical day, compared with 38% of home broadband users and 31% of all Internet users.

Most wireless users (80%) have broadband connections at home, so they are hardly dependent on public wireless access nodes. Rather, wireless users may be viewed as "deeper" Internet users than those who use wired connections exclusively.

Wireless Internet users are, on the whole, younger and better educated, and they have higher incomes than Internet users in general.

"We know that 'always on' broadband connections really deepen people's relationship to the Internet. Adding 'on the go' to the mix takes this a step further," said John Horrigan of Pew. "The convenience of wireless access gives people the chance to fire off a quick e-mail to someone while waiting in a doctor's office or check the news headlines on the way to work."

Ipsos Insight released a study of wireless Internet activity during November 2006.

The findings were similar to Pew's, with 16% of US Internet users connected wirelessly during the previous month, and 10% surfing the Web with a mobile phone.

Get a global view on Internet users — read eMarketer's Worldwide Internet Users: 2005-2011 report.

PricewaterhouseCoopers Reports that, Across Distribution Channels, the Internet Reflected the Largest Increases in Average Daily Rates for U.S. Hotels in 2006

Based on PricewaterhouseCoopers, Smith Travel Research, TravelClick, and PhoCusWright research and data, PricewaterhouseCoopers finds that average hotel room rates booked online increased 8.7 percent compared with a 6.8 percent estimated overall hotel room rate increase for US hotels in 2006.

The largest increase among online bookings, 8.9 percent, was for the “opaque” distribution channel, those third-party sources represented by online reservations that do not reveal the identity of a hotel until a reservation has been placed.

The largest percentage increase in the number of reservations among all distribution channels was for branded Web sites, those operated by hotel brands.

“This is a dramatic change from just a few years ago when third- party Web sites and distribution channels led the growth in hotel reservations and negotiated with hotel owners and operators from a strong position,” says Bjorn Hanson, principal in the PricewaterhouseCoopers Hospitality & Leisure practice.
“Increased hotel occupancy, generally excellent hotel-branded Web sites, price guarantees, the launch of new hotel brands and enhanced loyalty programs have been extremely effective in enabling brands to regain control of distribution,”
he adds.

Marketing to baby boomers is booming.

Companies have realized that this generation — 79 million strong — are active consumers and not following the patterns of previous generations.

"The size and spending power of boomers is large and substantial," says Mike Hess, global research director at media firm OMD, and smart marketers have learned that they're not tied to brands they've used, nor are they too old to switch.

Companies looking for a share of their spending include those that traditionally target an older demographic — such as financial services firms and makers of age-fighting cosmetics — but the advertising has a bit more edge than before.

And newcomers — such as dating site Match.com — are jumping into the battle for boomer bucks.

Among the marketing strategies:

•Show "real" boomers doing bold things. Dove's TV, Web and print marketing campaign for its new pro-age (as in not anti-age) line of beauty products includes discreet nude photos of real women 50 and older.

The ads are a response to a global Dove survey that found that 79% of women ages 50 to 64 do not see themselves as "older women," says Dove's marketing director, Kathy O'Brien. The poll of 1,450 women was done last June.

"These women believe they are too young to be called old," she says. "We wanted to show that beauty has no age limit. We wanted to show true honest beauty, including gray hair and wrinkles."

•Target boomers with non-traditional services. Match.com has homed in on single boomers, and they're the fastest-growing subscriber age group for the site that pairs singles. Since 2000, the number of boomers is up 350%, spokeswoman Amy Canaday says, to 1.7 million, or 11% of its membership.

A current TV ad for Match.com features a widowed New York woman age 71 whose Match.com logon is DanishBeauty22.

•Using iconic, nostalgic personalities. Financial services firm Ameriprise Financial tapped Dennis Hopper for its recent ad campaign.

Hopper isn't a baby boomer — he's 70 — but boomers see the actor as "an older brother who's been out there," says Doug Pippin, a creative director at Ameriprise ad agency Saatchi & Saatchi.

"He's lived true to himself, and he's proved that you can do this your way."

Pippin calls Hopper a "great anti-hero hero," who "stands for unconventional thinking."

There was some risk, given Hopper's history of gritty movie roles, including the drug-smuggling motorcycle rider in the 1969 boomer classic Easy Rider and a mad bomber in 1994's Speed.

"Of course, when you go with a celebrity, you have to be concerned … but we did a significant amount of testing prior to going with Dennis. He tested really well," says Kim Sharan, Ameriprise's chief marketing officer.

The ads scored low overall with adults surveyed by Ad Track, USA TODAY's weekly poll. But of the target boomer-age consumers — adults born from 1946 through 1964 — about half liked the ad "a lot" or "somewhat," and 79% rated the ads "very effective" or "somewhat effective."

"We know that these ads are striking a chord," Sharan says. "Financial services is a pretty staid field, so we wanted to bring a tone and personality that is more emotionally driven."

Source: USAToday

TripUp targets MySpace generation

Little known social travel network site Tripmates rebrands as TripUp, building what it calls "the first online travel community to relate to the My Space generation".

Social travel network site Tripmates announced the re-launch of its site under the brand TripUp.

TripUp offers opportunities to link up, meet up, and hook up with locals and travelers from all over the world. In addition to a fresh look, TripUp offers a variety of new features. Now, members can customize their profile styles and embed html and flash (such as graphics, videos, and slideshows). Building upon Tripmates’ user-generated travel blogs, photos, and reviews, TripUp becomes the first online travel community to offer globetrotters an opportunity to truly express themselves through customizable profiles.

Members from across the globe are planning their trips with the help of TripUp’s exclusive Trip Gurus-self-designated travel experts. In addition, TripUp members are using the social networking site to find Trip Buddies. From linking up with a local guide, to hooking up with a fellow traveler, to meeting up on a “trip date,” TripUp connects travelers before they depart so they never feel like a tourist while away.

“TripUp revolutionizes social travel networking,” said TripUp CEO, Sam Rogoway. “TripUp proves that online travel communities don’t have to be boring. We are pushing the envelope in online travel and building the first of these communities to relate to the MySpace generation.”

In connection with its re-launch, TripUp has added online travel pioneer Cameron Yuill to its Board of Directors. Yuill is the co-founder of MWM Capital, a capital advisory firm in San Francisco, and previously served in senior executive positions at Cendant Corp. (now Travelport) and Viator Inc. “I am pleased to join Sam and team in this very exciting, fast growing company,” said Yuill. “Unlike general social networks like My Space and Facebook, TripUp is aiming at a global niche of connecting travelers and locals. Plus, TripUp is at the forefront of online travel dating. We can’t wait for our first TripUp wedding!”

As paid search in the local market is heating up, select brands are beginning to maximize mobile marketing opportunities for local online ad-spends and promotions.

A popular cliché at marketing conferences in the 1990s was "go global and think local, or vice versa."

And while international branding is still vital in a worldwide arena, smart interactive marketers are realizing that regional is the future. Geo-targeting, pay-for-call search and even newer interactive business models -- many of which are based on pay-for-performance -- will move stuff off shelves, fill movie theater seats and cash in on "celling" to the on-the-go mobile consumer of today and tomorrow.

Here's a look at marketing strategies for how to do just that and how to begin cashing in on the $600 billion regional services marketplace.

Stop the silos
A good place to start for interactive marketers is to stop putting offline, online, mobile, search, content and commerce into silos.

Christopher Isaac, a McLean-based PricewaterhouseCoopers partner, underscores this in an email: "It remains both a challenge and a huge opportunity for companies to execute two critical enablers -- to provide digital media consumers an integrated experience across different platforms, such as mobile phones, TV and fixed internet, and also to understand individual and group consumer preferences so that a very fragmented consumer market can be aggregated into meaningful segments, not just one time but on an almost continual basis."

But why look local? Last year on iMediaconnection.com, I explained that Yahoo and Google mobile deals are opening the floodgates to the $90 billion budget U.S. businesses spend annually on local advertising.

The Kelsey Group claims that 40 percent of all online search queries are for local businesses, and an amazing 92 percent of local searches convert later offline -- and adding mobile maximizes that marketing.

According to The Kelsey Group's latest forecast, the market for pay-per-call advertising is expected to reach $3.7 billion in the next four years.

Stats are going to impact 2007
In a report from Borrell Associates, local online advertising will grow 31 percent in 2007, peaking at $7.7 billion. Local paid search will mushroom by 86 percent in 2007 to $1.8 billion, and local email advertising will grow to $233 million, a 54 percent increase.

"Just as paid search contributes to more than 40 percent of the total U.S. online ad spending market, so it is for local online advertising where paid search provides over 55 percent of the local total, " states eMarketer.com.

Don't forget that paid search in the local market is just heating up and many brands are slow to realize the value of local online ad-spends and tie-ins with mobile marketing opportunities.

So how does this translate to mobile and the new art and science of wireless marketing, or what I call "celling"?

Back in December, Ingenio, a leader in pay-per-call advertising, partnered with JumpTap, Inc., a mobile search provider for such carriers as Alltel and Virgin, with a goal of making that connection at the exact point people are ready to buy.

Ingenio has similar deals with AOL and Go2.com. Microsoft and Google also are implementing pay-per-call programs for mobile where advertisers only pay when the customer actually clicks or calls for more info or to buy products.

Two weeks ago, WPP Group, one of the world's leading communications services groups invested in JumpTap, Inc. This investment will provide clients of WPP companies with access to mobile search and advertising solutions. JumpTap's president and CEO, Dan Olschwang, predicts that his mobile operator customers will do more than 250 million searches per month by the end of '07.

According to Mark Read, CEO of WPP Digital, an initiative within WPP to develop the company's digital offering, the partnership will enable both JumpTap and WPP to develop new techniques to target and profile customers via mobile.

A quick check on the WPP website shows top clients, including such major brands as American Express, AT&T, Colgate-Palmolive, Ford, GlaxoSmithKline, IBM, Nestlé, Pfizer, Philip Morris, Vodafone, HSBC, Samsung and Unilever.

New content demands new business models
It's not just the brands and agencies that recognize the need for change. At NATPE, co-chair Stephen Davis remarked at the opening session on Jan. 16, that he projected the time is here for a shakeout, and by year's end, he sees the new media space evolving into a much different shape.

"I see 2007 as a year of reckoning in terms of what defines new media, and more importantly what does and doesn't work from a monetization perspective and how that will affect traditional distribution channels for content," Davis said, calling for superior business models to drive the coming together of technology and content.

No single ad model fits all
It may be that no single advertising model will fit all, especially in the mobile arena. That's why a savvy content creator like Versaly Entertainment's video group, VMBC.tv, is using four advertising models in the launch of its FastLane channel in Sprint's lifestyle section.

FastLane's target is early-adopting, big-spending, gadget-loving males ages 18-34. The channel features up to 14 different programs providing advertisers an even more defined audience. The ad-revenue models include 15-second interstitial commercials, program-exclusive sponsorships, integrated advertising and digital overlays.

Versaly co-founder and CEO Matthew Feldman claims the viewer picks the time and place they watch videos, and with mid-roll interstitial, he believes the viewer is fully engaged when a spot is shown.

The highly coveted niche audience of 100,000 viewers per month is perfect for Toyota, one of the advertisers that have already signed. Add a local call-to-action, and it's likely that a high percentage of local viewers could head to a dealership for a test drive the very same day they see the promos.

A revolution in local TV search
Just around the corner is an upgraded version of pay-for-performance that you might call ITV 2.0. In a first for the interactive television arena, at the January CES show in Las Vegas, Zodiac Interactive announced the general availability of TVLocalSearch, an application that allows consumers to use the TV and search for local businesses without interrupting the viewing experience.

Like its online counterpart, TVLocalSearch is free for consumers, easy to use and gives viewers relevant information on demand. Zodiac's TVCallME service instantly connects viewers to local businesses by telephone with a click of their remote control and offers a hassle free way to connect to a local vendor, opening up a cornerstone to monetize search for TV.

"To paraphrase Tip O'Neill, all advertising is local," says Matt Johnston, Zodiac's SVP of strategy and business development. "We're transforming TV from a branding medium to a transaction-ready platform that empowers local consumer transactions for national and local advertisers."

This is not some blue-sky venture. Cable operators flocked to the demo at CES, and Zodiac executives say it will be deployed within 90 days, which means that by summer '07, the U.S. might have a transactional system that could even beat the red-button on remotes in Europe. [In case you've never seen a remote over the pond, it includes a red button you can press to buy stuff and find out more information on what you see on TV.]

IVillagelive.com offers 3-screen interactivity
Meanwhile, I'll just have to satisfy my quest for interactivity by heading over to iVillageLive.com to join their West Coast chat with fellow viewers who seem to appreciate a two-screen show that spices up content with mobile quizzes and polls. Sponsors I spotted include Bally Total Fitness, Estee Lauder, Healthy Choice and Unilever.

Dialing for Small-Biz Dollars

Pay-per-call ads are luring to the Web service-oriented businesses that don't have Web sites and prefer calls over clicks to rack up sales

by Jeffrey Gangemi

Three-year-old Rhode Island-based roofing company AS Enterprises had a big, albeit common, problem: not enough customers. Owner Ann Marie Appleton had tried offering free estimates in local circulars and flyers, but her competitors were doing the same, and the resulting leads were lukewarm at best. She considered an ad in the SuperPages yellow pages, a division of Verizon (VZ) spin-off Idearc Media (IAR), because of its large distribution and solid reputation, but the next edition wouldn't be delivered to homes for eight months.

Eventually, Appleton's sales representative sold her on the idea of a monthly agreement for the company's new Pay For Call service, where businesses pay for each call made to their business via SuperPages' online local search results.

Appleton couldn't be happier with her choice. The service costs around $600 a month, depending on how many times her ad is served and how many calls she gets. AS Enterprises totaled more than $240,000 in sales in 2006, up from just $60,000 the year before, and Appleton says a good 70% of that business came directly from her pay-per-call advertising.

Calls Over Clicks

People used to call just for the free estimate, says Appleton, but those who call from SuperPages are ready to do business. Her closing rate on calls went from 25% to between 60% and 70%, and her call volume has tripled. Since the service requires that she bid against other businesses, each call costs about $25, but Appleton says she'd gladly pay twice that. "It pays for itself with just one job, and I get between four and eight good jobs a month," she says.

Princeton (N.J.)-based research firm The Kelsey Group estimates that the pay-per-call market will more than double each year for the next five years, with revenues reaching $3.7 billion by 2010. "Call tracking will live side-by-side with pay-per-click, e-mail tracking, coupon prints, and other measurable consumer actions. For off-line businesses in the service sector (painters, roofers, etc.), calls will have a higher importance than clicks," says Matthew Booth, senior vice-president and program director for interactive local media at Kelsey.

Small-business customers like Appleton say it offers a better return on investment than pay-per-click advertising and suits the needs of businesses that often can't close a sale via the Web only (see BusinessWeek.com, 1/29/07, "Small-Biz Ads: The Year of the Web").

Dropping the Dime

Still, the acceptance of pay-per-call by no means signals the end of pay-per-click; in fact, that market continues to grow. But some small-business advertisers are getting outpriced by their larger counterparts (see BusinessWeek.com, 1/22/07, "The Small Fry Sour on Search Ads"), leading them to look for alternatives.

Most pay-per-call advertising services work like this: First, companies bid for placement on keyword searches. Then their ad is served to the user based on location, and the company is charged each time a user calls; the ad itself is placed for free. When companies register with most providers, their site is assigned a unique phone number that appears in the ad, so that the company can track how many calls actually come through the pay-per-call advertising system. Businesses only pay when someone searching for their product or service picks up the phone and calls them.

Some companies think that the local nature of the product will bring in loads of new advertisers. Ingenio, a San Francisco-based local search advertising company with 110 employees and more than $100 million in annual revenue, is one that's betting that the torrid growth rates of pay-per-click advertising can't continue forever. "Everyone focuses on the 500,000 U.S. businesses targeted by pay-per-click, when there are 13 million businesses not engaged online at all, and 70% of them don't have Web sites," says Ingenio Chief Marketing Officer Marc Barach.

Serious Callers

Therein lies an untapped demand that's making companies like Ingenio salivate. Through their bidding system, Ingenio, like SuperPages.com, has created a virtual market that dictates its own pricing, much like the pay-per-click model. Barach says prices vary across different industries and for different services. Legal-service ads draw higher prices than those from hair salons, for example. And when tax time is peaking, Barach says the price of placing tax-service ads on portals such as AOL (AOL) and MSN (MSFT) goes through the roof.

Barach thinks the advertiser's return on investment more than makes up for the higher initial price of pay-per-call vs. pay-per-click. He says the average conversion rate on a pay-per-call ad is three to five times more successful than a pay-per-click ad in a field like legal services, and that rate grows to eight times for smaller purchases like flower shops. "The reason is that people who are clicking to read Web sites are in the research phase, and people who are calling the merchant aren't doing it for entertainment. Hence, these things convert more."

Get Them Talking

Google (GOOG) is currently at work on its own pay-per-call service, which already works as a part of Google Maps but hasn't yet been offered to U.S. small businesses. In that system, users click on an icon for a restaurant, enter their numbers, and an outside provider connects the user and the establishment. The company has already launched a formal pay-per-call product in India, says Rohit Dahawan, a product manager for Google that oversees the click-to-call and pay-per-call products. And they're working on more such products, to be launched in the next several months in the U.S. They've also started tracking calls as part of their updated small-business AdWords service.

When deciding with whom to advertise, small businesses try to keep in mind the eventual placement of their ads and the amount of traffic that will see it. SuperPages.com had 2.8 billion searches in 2006; Ingenio's network of AOL and MSN reached more than 1.1 billion searches. Says Robyn Rose, vice-president of Internet marketing for Idearc Media, "Having a heritage in the yellow-pages business, we know that about 70% of companies are service-based. Most want to conduct business over the phone."

For Travel, Two-Thirds of Web Users Both Research and Transact Online

With the U.S. online travel marketplace approaching $70 billion, Burst Media's survey of some 2,100 web users 18 years and older who plan to travel in the next three months found that nearly half (47.2 percent) of respondents who will use the web to plan their upcoming travel say the internet will be their primary travel resource.

Among age segments, respondents 25-34 years are most likely to say the internet will be their primary travel resource (53.2 percent); respondents 55 years and older are least likely (41.4 percent). Half (51.8 percent) of respondents reporting household income (HHI) of $75,000-$99,999, and nearly two-thirds (63.1 percent) of respondents reporting HHI of $100,000 or more, say the internet will be their primary travel resource.

Burst found that two-thirds (66.9 percent) of respondents will conduct travel research as well as make an online travel transaction - and 33.1 percent will use the web solely as an information resource. As household income (HHI) increases so does the likelihood that a respondent will use the internet to conduct both travel research and travel transactions: 72.3 percent of those reporting HHI of $75,000-$99,999, and 79.7 percent reporting HHI of $100,000 or more, will conduct both research and transactions.

Of those who will conduct a travel transaction on the web, about three-quarters (74.0 percent) will purchase airline tickets, 72.9 percent will likely make hotel reservations, and over one-third (40.4 percent) will likely rent an automobile. Those who plan to make transactions online will also conduct travel research online - 59.7 percent will research travel destinations, and 28.6 percent will research travel/tour operators.

Among survey respondents who use the internet solely as a research tool, the most popular topics of research are hotel accommodations and prices (50.1 percent), travel destinations (45.8 percent), airline flights and fares (39.2 percent), tour/travel operators (24.4 percent), and car rental availability/rates (12.2 percent).

Respondents were asked what features of a travel resource website make them want to return to it: The most cited were the ability to check flights, hotels and rental car's rates/availability (55.1 percent), destination information (49.9 percent), and travel promotions and specials (49.7 percent).

Women placed much greater importance than men on travel promotions and specials (55.4 percent versus 44.5 percent). Older respondents placed greater emphasis than younger respondents on destination information:Over half (56.5 percent) of respondents 55 years or older say destination information is essential for a website to continue to draw their attention - compared with 51.8 percent of respondents 35-54 years, and 43.1 percent of the 18-34 year segment.

10 Likely Elements of Google’s Local Search Algorithm

Several of us have been involved in a lot of discussion about why the same search produces different results between Google Maps and Google.com.

The recent expansion of the Google Maps Onebox on Google.com makes local search optimization much more important than it was before this new display was implemented widely on Google.com. Now, whether you have a web site or not, a business that Google ranks highly in Google Maps can get dramatic exposure thanks to last month’s change. How dramatic? Well, according to Bill Tancer’s Hitwise data, Google.com gets about 100x more traffic than Google Maps. So, yeah, this can be huge for some small businesses.

The inevitable question, then — and the one several of us have been discussing — is what makes the Google Maps algorithm different from Google.com? Google Maps has a unique set of data to draw from. Here’s a semi-educated guess — but a guess, at best — at some of the factors that might make up the Google Maps algorithm. (These are not necessarily listed in order of importance.)

1. Use of Google’s Local Business Center (LBC)

Local search requires structured data to be effective. Google needs to be able to match the business to a location. By submitting a business listing, you’re giving Google the data confirmation it needs to make the association between your business and your place on the map.

2. Availability/Trust of other business data

If the business is not participating directly with Google’s LBC, does it have listings in the other major business databases like Acxiom, Amacai/Localeze, and infoUSA? If so, and if the listings are the same from one database to the next, Google may be able to assign more trust to the business and its location. Listings in Internet Yellow Pages (IYP) providers such as Superpages and YellowPages.com might be used for a similar purpose.

3. A Business Web Site

Having a web site is not a requirement to being found in Google Maps (or Yahoo! Local, for that matter). However, having a web site, and having pages that are properly optimized for local search terms (keyword and location) would most surely be a factor in the local search algorithm. Taking steps to make your page(s) more local should be part of a business’s local SEO effort.

4. Listings in 2nd-tier Local Directories

I use the term “2nd tier” because I’m putting yellow pages on the top level of trusted local directories. Very slightly below them, I think, would be sites such as CitySearch, Yelp, InsiderPages, and the like. I’ve seen Yelp data cited an inordinate amount of times in Google Maps in recent days for a variety of local business listings. It seems logical to suggest that both the business data and the user reviews on sites like these would be impacting the local search algorithm. (More on reviews in a moment.)

5. Listings in Vertical Directories

For some queries, Google Maps pulls data from verticals such as TripAdvisor, ChefMoz, Gayot.com, Fodors, Travelocity, Wcities.com, Frommers, HotelGuide.net, and so on…. These sites are often being used for reviews that Google shows, but also for secondary business data such as Payments Accepted, Directions, Price Range, Checkout Time, etc.

6. References from other Web sites

Citations and links from other web sites that include the business name and location would, in theory, be helpful in ranking for local search terms. This might include references from Chamber of Commerce-style sites, Visitor Bureau-style sites, city/town directories, and even school web sites, not to mention the local categories of DMOZ, Yahoo Directory, and the like.

7. Reviews

It’s hard to get a handle on the impact of user reviews in the algorithm. In many searches, a 4-star rated business will be listed higher than a 5-star business. In some searches (see below), a business with no reviews will be listed above a 5-star rated business. That speaks to the fact that reviews can be “gamed,” though I would still suggest strongly that both quantity and quality of reviews are part of the algorithm.

8. Proximity to location

Not too long ago, this was a prime factor in many local search algorithms. A local search SERP used to show listings based on proximity by default. That’s not the case anymore, but for any location-based search, it still has to play some part in the algorithm.

9. Location Prominence and User Query

Full credit for this goes to Bill Slawski of SEO by the Sea, who wrote about location prominence in relation to the search query a user enters. In a nutshell, a Google patent application Bill analyzed reveals that some local queries are said to apply to a smaller geographic area than other queries. To borrow an example Bill has used, someone searching for car dealers may be more willing to consider businesses over a 30-40 mile area than someone looking for pizza. The algorithm, if this patent is in use, would take user queries into account as it determines how big an area to include in the results. (Bill, did I get that right?)

10. Use of other Google services

No, not the dreaded Google rewards AdWords customers with higher rankings conspiracy; that’s not what I’m suggesting. I’ve seen no evidence to suggest a business that uses Google Checkout, for example, gets found easier in local search (yet). There is the possibility, though, that the use of a Google Maps service — such as coupons — could play a small factor in the local search algorithm. Coupons are too new, and may not have wide enough adoption to say for sure one way or another. More research would need to be done.

- 30 -

So, that’s my quick and unscientific stab/guess at what might be rolled in to Google’s local search algorithm. I’m sure it’s nowhere near complete, and your thoughts and guesses are very welcome in the comments.

To underscore the difficulty of de-constructing a local search algorithm, where keywords and anchor text aren’t nearly enough to determine relevance, let’s look at a not-too-competitive search: dry cleaners in san jose. Since there’s not a ton of data to dig through, it’s easier to spot differences between the results we get back.

Listing “A” — The one dry cleaner with a web site gets the top listing. The web site has a PR=1, but is not especially optimized for local search aside from internal anchor text that says “San Jose, California” pointing to a page that holds a Mapquest map and little more. Google’s info. about the business shows data from Acxiom (Allpages.com), Yelp, Citysearch, Superpages.com, and others — a nice variety of external references for such a small business. This business has no reviews, and doesn’t appear to have submitted to Google’s LBC. It’s further from the San Jose city center than listing B, and about the same distance as listing C.

Listing “B” — This business, like listing C below it, does not have a web site. It also doesn’t appear to have submitted to Google’s LBC. It’s closer to the city center than listings A and C, and also has a 5-star review from Yelp. Neither listing A nor listing C has any reviews. It has fewer 3rd-party web references than listing A, but more than listing C.

Listing “C” — This business is the only one that is using Google’s LBC. The business has no reviews, but is using the LBC to offer a coupon. The only 3rd-party web reference Google shows is an Acxiom listing on AllPages.com. It’s about the same distance away from the city center as listing A, but further away than listing B.

What’s interesting to note here is that the SERPs below this Google Maps display are filled with directory sites such as Citysearch, Yelp, InsiderPages, and even Yahoo Local. No actual dry cleaner has the juice to outrank deep pages on these sites. Listing B is the only one of our three that appears in the Yahoo Local Top 10 — it’s the first dry cleaner listed, and has a 5-star review.

Conclusion

Traditional search is keyword-based and the algorithms center mainly on the keyword: where and how often it appears in the page title, on-page text, inbound anchor links, etc. Local search is a different ballgame because geography gets thrown into the mix, and geographic data is spread out far and wide on the web. The fact that most small businesses haven’t done anything to confirm their online data only makes local search harder to get right … and makes the algorithm that much harder to de-construct.

Free 'Click-to-Call' Feature Now Found on Google Maps

Google is rolling out click-to-call functionality in the U.S. via Google Maps. http://maps.google.com/

Microsoft's Windows Live Local has been offering click to call, but the feature has been showing up on Google Maps as well, with Google picking up the tab for the call, writes Garett French in a ZDNet blog, citing Washington state blogger Justin Uberti, who offers details. http://juberti.blogspot.com/2006/11/google-maps-adds-click-to-call.html Users can be connected to listed businesses by entering their own number in the "Connect for free" box.

The new service is vulnerable to abuse - crank calls and free long-distance calling - as both Valleywag and Rogers point out. Google's click to call FAQ foresees the problem of crank calls ("What if someone enters my phone number instead of theirs as a prank call?") and offers this:

"Google takes fraud and spamming very seriously. We use technical methods to prevent future prank calls from the same user within a reasonable period of time. You won't be charged for any such calls. Please contact adwords-support@google.com if you believe someone is entering your phone number without your permission or knowledge."

Source: MarketingVox

Yahoo runs mobile phone advertising in 18 nations

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Yahoo Inc. said on Sunday it has signed up top corporate advertisers to use its advertising system to run brand ads on mobile phones in 18 countries, marking a major diversification beyond computers.

The Internet media company has begun offering its brand advertising to reach mobile phone users across markets in Western Europe, South Asia and the Americas, capitalizing on its prowess in supplying Web advertising to computer users.

Yahoo said it has signed up major advertisers including Hilton's Embassy Suites, Infiniti, Intel Corp., Nissan, Pepsi & Co, Procter & Gamble Asia-Pacific and Singapore Airlines will be initial advertisers on Yahoo's mobile advertising system.

The Sunnyvale, California-based company already offers online marketing services to a large majority of the top 100 U.S. advertisers. By expanding onto mobile phones, Yahoo aims to help corporate advertisers run coordinated campaigns that reach both computer and phone audiences, an official said.

"This is really about Yahoo staking out its leadership in the emerging space on the mobile phone," said Steve Boom, Yahoo senior vice-president for mobile and broadband.

Yahoo is the world's top provider of Web display ads such as online banners, commonly used for brand advertising.

It is seeking to become the early mover among Internet companies in mobile phones, racing against Google Inc. which over the past two years overtook Yahoo in ad revenues the two companies receive in the overall market for Web search.

Yahoo is betting that as most mobile phones now come with higher-resolution color screens and Internet browsers, the mobile advertising market is poised to explode, Boom said.

"We have the three legs of the stool," he said. "We are not only building the advertising platform. We are actually building the advertising relationships with it. We also have the audience," he said.

The new service is available in Western Europe in Britain, Ireland, Germany, Spain, France, Italy and in the Americas in United States, Canada, Brazil, Mexico and Argentina.

It also plans to offer the advertising service in Asia-Pacific markets including Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam.

Advertisements will run along the top of Yahoo's home page on the Internet screens of mobile phones. Consumers can click on the interactive ads to learn more about an advertiser's offer or call the advertiser directly for details.

Yahoo Japan Corp. <4689.t>, the company's joint venture with Softbank Corp. <9984.t> has been running ads in Japan for several years in what ranks as one of the world's most advanced mobile technology markets.

Yahoo's latest moves build on an exclusive partnership deal it struck in November with Vodafone, the world's largest mobile phone carrier, to provide corporate brand ads in Britain. Yahoo also introduced display ads in the United States in November.

Over the past year, Yahoo has also announced several enhancements to its mobile Web home page to make it faster and easier for consumers to search the Web, check e-mail, instant message, or check on news or sports.

The latest announcements were made ahead of Europe's major annual mobile phone conference in Barcelona this week.

New Ranking Model Launches
We're excited to announce that the new ranking model has launched today, February 5, 2007, in our U.S. market. The new ranking model is designed to improve user results through higher quality search ads. When users engage with these higher quality search ads, advertisers will receive more interested, valuable potential customers, helping to drive better results for your business.

As we previously announced, both bid amount and ad quality
now determine an ad's rank in search results.
Your bid is the maximum amount that you're willing to pay when your ad is clicked. You will never be charged more than this amount.

Your ad's quality is determined by:

• The ad's historical performance—determined by its click-through rate relative to its position on the page.
  
• The ad's expected performance, relative to competing ads displayed at the same time—determined by various relevance factors considered by Yahoo!'s ranking algorithms.
  

You can gain an understanding of an ad's quality by looking at its quality index.

Example of How Ads may be Ranked
The graphic below helps illustrate a scenario that may result from this change:


Learn more about the new ranking model. Learn more about the quality index.

Five Things to do to Take Advantage of the New Ranking Model
To take advantage of the new ranking model, you should:

• Include keywords in your ads (use our Insert Keyword feature).
  
• Choose keywords for each ad group carefully.
  
• Use ad testing.
  
• Use Excluded Words to optimize your Advanced match type ads.
  
• Review your current bids and set a campaign budget to meet your business goals.
  

For more details, please click here.

Important Note on Forecasting
Starting today, February 5, with the roll-out of the new ranking model, we will offer several tools to use in making bidding decisions. However, there will be a seven- to ten-day transition period during which the "Estimated Clicks per Bid" forecasting tool will begin to accumulate data from the new ranking model in order to provide more recent historical traffic estimates. After these seven to ten days, you can have greater confidence in using this tool. In the meantime, we recommend that you use the "Bid Range for Top Positions" information to help guide your bidding decisions.

Learn more about the forecasting tools.

New technologies make gauging Web ads' effectiveness more difficult

By Anick Jesdanun, The Associated Press

NEW YORK — At Yahoo's finance site, stock quotes update automatically and continually, the numbers flashing green and red as prices rise and fall. Wall Street investors can easily leave a single Web page up all day.

Ajax — the software trick used on the page, Yahoo's e-mail service and elsewhere — is enabling flashier, more convenient sites. It's also contributing to Yahoo's decline in page views, a yardstick long used for bragging rights and advertising sales.

"These technologies have outgrown the metrics," said Peter Daboll, Yahoo's chief of insights and the former chief executive of comScore Media Metrix, the measurement company that declared Yahoo second to the online hangout MySpace in page views. "It's really important as an industry to come back down to earth and off this chest-thumping about who's biggest."

More important than "truckloads of page views," Daboll said, are visitors' loyalty and their willingness to respond to ads — qualities harder to measure. If a page updates on its own without reloading in its entirety, people may be sticking around longer than the measurements suggest.

Experts say the stubborn attachment to page views also may be keeping some sites from improving their usability.

Jakob Nielsen, a Web design expert with Nielsen Norman Group, notes that many news sites force visitors to click multiple times to read longer stories in sections, even though he would much prefer scrolling down a long story and avoiding interruptions.

"Because you are measuring the wrong things, you are driving your project in the wrong direction," Nielsen said. "You are not maximizing what causes value. You are maximizing the things a computer can count easily."

Many websites and advertisers, however, continue to value page views, and MySpace officials say their users continue to return frequently even as the site requires full page reloads for just about everything.

"Over time, page views have been a pretty accurate measure of a site's popularity," said Michael Barrett, chief revenue officer for Fox Interactive Media, the News Corp. unit that oversees MySpace. "A page view doesn't necessarily equal an ad opportunity, but (is) an important barometer."

The leading measurement companies aren't about to abandon page views, either, even as they develop supplemental measurements for gauging consumer interaction and loyalty.

"People kind of cling to it, even if they know it's flawed," said Gregory Dale, chief technology officer of comScore. "They want to see this familiar metric."

According to comScore, MySpace managed in just three years to edge out Yahoo as the busiest website in the United States by page views. In December, MySpace had 41 billion page views compared with Yahoo's 36 billion, down 2% from a year earlier.

Yet Yahoo remains arguably the Internet's leading brand — both in terms of the number of unique monthly visitors and the average time spent, according to comScore. Over the past year, Yahoo's monthly audience grew 3%. To throw even more confusion into the mix, rival Nielsen/NetRatings has Yahoo leading in page views as well.

Even before Ajax, techniques for measuring Web audience have come into question.

Through much of the 1990s, websites touted "hits" — the number of elements pulled from a server. But that rewarded sites heavy with graphics and photos, even though too many can be distracting, especially with dial-up connections the norm at the time, design expert Nielsen said.

Companies like Nielsen/NetRatings — no relation to the consultant or his firm — started refining which hits should count, said Dave Osborn, a director at Nielsen/NetRatings. All elements in a single page are counted as one, and thus "page view" was born.

It became a good gauge for advertising potential because it's roughly proportional to the number of ad impressions — whether a site typically displays one, two or more on a single page. Advertisers look to it in deciding where to place ads.

Marketers also turn to unique audience — the number of visitors to a site in a given month, whether that person visits once for 10 seconds or several times. The measurement is reflective of a site's reach as advertisers like to know they aren't displaying ads to the same people over and over, even if the site draws significant page views.

Together, the two measures have served websites and advertisers adequately, despite frequent inconsistencies between comScore, Nielsen/NetRatings and often a site's own logs. Adjustments were made along the way to account for new techniques such as pop-up ads, which appear to a computer like a regular page view and thus could artificially inflate a site's count.

But now comes Ajax, "the first that has changed the model of page views from an impression measurement perspective," said Sheryl Draizen, senior vice president with the trade group Interactive Advertising Bureau. Her organization has convened a working group to set industry standards on how ad impressions should be counted in light of Ajax.

Other technologies that could deflate page views include Really Simple Syndication, or RSS, which pulls a news site or blog's new entries, allowing a visitor to bypass a site's home page — and ads — for the item of interest. Likewise, someone can watch a three-minute video clip without needing to retrieve a new page.

In such cases, visitors may view fewer pages, but they are more engaged and thus more likely to pay attention to any advertising, said Steve Rubel, senior vice president with the public-relations firm Edelman Worldwide.

"It's easy to get eyeballs now but it might not be the right eyeballs," Rubel said.

Page views have their roots in traditional media, comparable to a newspaper's circulation or a broadcaster's viewership. Although measures for those media have had to adapt to developments such as the rise of video recorders, they were seen as the best available.

With the Internet, it became possible to measure not only how many people viewed an ad but what they did with it. Google Inc., in particular, has been adept at pushing an alternative model of charging only when a visitor clicks on an ad.

Jesse James Garrett, the Adaptive Path LLC president who publicly coined the "Ajax" term two years ago, suggests scrapping page views entirely.

"Page views have been a broken metric for a long time, and the industry has tried to put a good face on that," he said. "Now a new technology has come along to force the industry to deal with the fact that page views are ... not a good way of measuring audience engagement."

At Best Western, it's 'tech out' time
Free fast Internet, flat TVs help chain shed predictability

Stephanie Paterik
The Arizona Republic
Feb. 9, 2007 12:00 AM

Best Western is one of America's most recognizable hotel brands, but that's not good enough anymore. Fresh off its 60th birthday, the Phoenix-based chain is forging ahead with a plan to bring the brand up to date in a world where travelers have more choices than ever.

The goal is to change people's perception that Best Western is a modest, roadside motel, good for a little shut-eye but not much more.

The plan is to modernize the product to attract more business travelers and young people. The hotel, which has banked on familiar digs and predictable service, is partnering with NASCAR, beefing up online operations and appealing to a generation that grew up with the latest techie gadgets.

"They don't want the same old same old," said Denise Seomin, consumer media relations manager. "They recognize the brand, but now it's about contemporizing it."

The first step is raising standards. Last year, all 2,400 North American Best Westerns started offering free high-speed Internet in every guest room. Most hotels charge for the service.

All new Best Westerns, plus some old ones, will be outfitted with flat-screen TVs and alarm clocks with iPod adaptors.

"It's basically about tech-ing out the rooms," said Scott Wilson, director of worldwide sales. "We continue to move like everyone else to the Gen X'er."

The company also is banking on partnerships with brands such as NASCAR and Harley-Davidson. It implemented that strategy in 2004, and so far it is paying off.

Through its partnership with NASCAR, revenue went up 60 percent last year, Wilson said.

Best Western is one of 350 NASCAR sponsors, and among 40 that are Fortune 1,000 companies. Those elite firms not only benefit from the loyalty of 75 million racing fans, they promote one another.

For example, General Motors now sends some of its business travelers to Best Western. When employees log onto GM's intranet, they find a link for the hotel chain and its loyalty program.

"General Motors spends $250 million on travel," Wilson said, referring to the company's annual travel budget.

The impact of NASCAR fans is important, too. Especially considering that the crowd is incredibly loyal and increasingly affluent.

Top drivers Michael Waltrip and David Reutimann were in Sedona last week to shoot a TV commercial for Best Western's new national advertising campaign. The commercial will air in March.

In the spot, the drivers park their flashy race car outside the Best Western Arroyo Roble Hotel and Creekside Villas in Sedona, with scenic red rocks in the background. They eat breakfast at the hotel's cafe and give racing tips to kids staying there.

"My generation, they like something in your face," Reutimann, 36, said after a day of filming. "NASCAR is pretty bold and in your face."

Reutimann has fond memories of staying at the hotels as a kid. He said he is proud to represent them as an adult.

But not everyone has a positive association with the brand. That is Best Western's challenge, Wilson said.

"We have a mixed bag of roadside, seaside and corporate hotels," he said. "Our issue is, if someone lives by a roadside motel, that's their impression."

Waltrip said he did not stay at a Best Western for many years, until the brand started sponsoring his car.

"They were pretty predictable when I was younger," he said. "People expect you to be modern."

Waltrip said that once he "started paying attention again," he noticed the brand has a diverse product. He points to the all-suites Best Western in New York as well as the villas along Sedona's Oak Creek.

Best Western executives expect NASCAR will boost revenue another 40 percent this year, and property upgrades will inject new life into the hotels.

Ultimately, the company would like to create a number of brands with a tiered system of service. Without a tiered system, it faces the challenge of trying to be all things to all people.

That won't happen anytime soon. Best Western functions as a membership, where individual hotel owners vote on changes. That makes Best Western less nimble than some of its competitors.

But Seomin points out that structure could also be an asset. Travelers increasingly favor unique properties over chains, and Best Western's owners have the freedom to create a distinctive guest experience.

She said most embrace the opportunity.

"They know they need to evolve," she said

Loyalty Is Key to Online Travel Market

FEBRUARY 12, 2007

Travel suppliers use loyalty programs to stay competitive online.

Many travelers know the trick to getting the best price online: They shop at online travel agencies, then book rooms or flights on a supplier's site.

Yet online travel agencies are still fierce competitors. Although a head-to-head matchup favors suppliers, many consumers still say "It depends" when it comes to their purchase preferences, according to a survey conducted by market research firm eVOC Insights and RelevantView.

eMarketer senior analyst and travel specialist Jeffrey Grau thinks the "It depends" crowd has good reasons for using both online travel agencies (OTAs) and suppliers.

"For many people, it's not a black-and-white choice. Each channel has a different set of attributes. The agencies give you a broad selection, and make it easy to book multiple travel segments at the same time, such as hotels, airlines and car rentals. For details about a lodging facility, however, the supplier wins out. More importantly, supplier loyalty program points are easier to get directly from the supplier," said Mr. Grau.

The eVOC study backs up this statement. For hotel price and selection, and for adding flights, rooms or vehicles, travelers prefer online travel agencies. Suppliers win on rewards programs and ease of cancellation, and are favored by travelers who hate cancellation fees.

Besides reward programs, suppliers can compete with OTAs on price, according to a new study by eVOC Insights and Hospitality eBusiness Strategies. Visitors to a major hotel brand site said that having a best Internet rate guarantee would get them to book directly on the brand site instead of sites like Expedia or Travelocity. Special prices and promotions also got travelers' attention.

Warning! Outlook 2007 Might Trash HTML Again

Stefan Pollard - Feb 5, 2007 - EmailLabs

So, you think you have ironed out all the kinks in your HTML formatting, now that you've had it tested and validated and checked and rechecked for spam content, bad code and email-client incompatibility?

Sorry, it's time to go back to the drawing board again. Outlook 2007, the newest version of Microsoft's business-leading email client, will make your HTML formatting either disappear or look extremely ugly. If you haven't spoken with your email designer lately, you'd better email them this article and look at our suggestions for getting around this new challenge to proper email rendering.

Essentially, what's happening is that Outlook 2007 will no longer use Microsoft's Internet Explorer engine to render HTML. Outlook now uses IE to read content in HTML messages and switches over to its sister Office program Word to compose messages. Outlook 2007 no longer uses IE, apparently because some layman users were finding inconsistencies between IE and Word.

Instead, it will use an updated version of Word to both render and compose. The issue is that designers are finding problems with the way Word handles, or more accurately doesn't handle, high-function design element such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), background images, and rich media.

The Real Outlook 2007 Challenge: Creative or Marketing?

Because the Outlook email client is used by 50% to 80% of business email users, any changes to it makes email designers, marketers and publishers nervous, especially those in business-to-business marketing.

When Microsoft announced quietly late in 2006 (via developer articles) that it was replacing IE with Word, email designers flooded industry blogs with protests over the loss of HTML functionality. The greatest howls came from email designers who had evolved attractive, functional messages using CSS. Outlook 2007 will have limited support for CSS.

However, email-marketing specialists have been more temperate. They argue that Outlook 2003, which expanded default image blocking and link disabling, was far more damaging to marketing efforts and forced marketers to adapt to the kind of streamlined HTML design that will perform acceptably in Outlook 2007.

A Critical Change: Loss of 'Alt' Tags

Whether Outlook 2007 is truly a game-changing event or merely puts a crimp in creative email design is about to be seen, but it will affect even HTML-light email messages and make it more important either to streamline your HTML design or to offer an attractive text alternative.

The most critical loss, however, is something that appears relatively minor: Outlook 2007 will no longer support the use of "alt" tags, which provide a few words of text to describe an image and which appear when the image is disabled.

Although it appears minor, this is actually a pretty serious loss of function. Alt tags help give meaning in an email where images are disabled, because you can use the few words of text in the alt tag to either describe the image, the offer it represents or the action you want the reader to take when the image itself doesn't render.

Losing that function combined with images disabled by default will hurt email design that relies heavily on images. If that describes your email templates, you will need to rework your templates again.

Here are the other functions Outlook 2007 will no longer support:

• Forms
• Background images
• Animated GIFs
• Flash
• CSS Float or position commands

Unless your ROI reports show conclusively that your program success depends on either having a form embedded in each email message or that an animated image really does drive response or conversions, you should consider lightening up your HTML use to accommodate Outlook 2007 users.

Doing this may give you an unexpected bonus as well: Your delivery, open and response rates may go up as well because you'll have fewer elements that will either break in an email client or trigger a spam filter.

How to Respond to Outlook 2007 Changes

First, don't push the panic button or order a wholesale revision of your HTML templates.

The new Outlook is scheduled to be released this month (February 2007). It will take time for the new version to migrate from early adopters to the broader audience of general users.

Second, if you have already had your HTML formatting audited or validated, or if you have streamlined the design in the last year, you might not have to worry. The Word rendering engine will either read your message just fine or alter it so little as to have almost no impact.

And, if you have already reworked your templates to accommodate default image blocking and link disabling as well as preview-pane use (see the resource list at the bottom of this article), you've done most of the work to manage any damage Outlook 2007 could inflict.

How to Counteract Outlook 2007 Changes

If you have already reworked your email templates to create a lighter, faster HTML format, you've already done much of the heavy lifting.

Here are five steps you can take to accommodate the reduced functionality expected in Outlook 2007:

1. Create a text version or rework and streamline your current text edition.

Your email program should create a text version of your HTML message automatically, but you should review it for readability and appearance. Some text creators merely dump all the text into a document. While you don't have the same graphic devices that make HTML so attractive and easy to read, you can still use white space and typography to create an easy-to-read text message.

2. Test rendering in Outlook 2007.

Test all email templates, including HTML, text, newsletters, stand-along mailings and transactional emails, by opening a test email message in Outlook 2007 to see how it will render.

3. Review your use of HTML across all mailings: reduce your reliance on CSS and other high-function elements or create an HTML-light version that does not use them.

This is a key part of any email design program regardless of Outlook 2007's expected impact. Validate your HTML code using the free WC3.org validator service, which you'll find in our Resource Center.

4. Reduce reliance on large images to display products or drive response.

Large images have become problematic anyway since they take up most of the space in an HTML message and leave relatively little room for text. And, with the greater use of image disabling, putting all your information into one big image means your readers won't see a thing if they view it with images blocked or in the email client's preview pane.

5. Use EmailLabs’ “Complete Guide for Creating HTML Emails: Technical and Design Best Practices” to examine and rework HTML formatting.

This free downloadable guide, which you can access on our site, explains the technical side of HTML formatting in easy-to-understand language and will give your designers the tools they need to craft a compelling yet rendering-savvy message template. Find it here: http://www.emaillabs.com/reports/emaillabs_html_email_guide.html

In Summary

The changes coming in Outlook 2007 will affect designers primarily, with the email community divided over just how much of a negative impact it will have on email-marketing messages. If you have already revised your email templates to cope with the more far-reaching changes imposed in Outlook 2003 and other updated email clients, including preview panes and default image blocking and link disabling, your HTML design might need only some minor tweaks. If you have not updated your HTML formatting for a year, or if you do not offer an HTML-light or text version messages, now is the time to go back to the drawing board and streamline your format.