Street Fight Daily: SMB Spend Still Offline, Factual and TripAdvisor Hook Up

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.

smalltown1Small Business Web Ad Dollars: Still Way Too Small (AllThingsD)
The Boston Consulting Group has come out out with a new report that shows only 3 percent of small business ad dollars going online. The numbers come from a survey conducted last fall of 550 small companies, and shouldn’t come as a complete surprise to anyone who has watched the Web guys try to break into the market for many, many years.

5 Tips for Building a Smarter Geofence (Street Fight)
The number of advertisers using “geo-aware” technology in their mobile ad campaigns jumped from 17% in 2011 to 36% in 2012, according to a report by Verve Mobile, and yet there is still confusion in the marketplace over what makes a geofencing campaign useful, and when location targeting is necessary to achieve a high ROI. Here are five strategies for creating a smarter geofencing campaign.

Factual and TripAdvisor to Scratch Each Other’s Backs With Global Restaurant Data Partnership (PandoDaily)
The Los Angeles big data company will provide restaurant data in 50 countries, including both places and reviews, and in turn will receive raw user-generated data from TripAdvisor travelers. In some cases the user data may reflect changing contact information, while in others, it represents an entirely new business – in others still, it’s simply bad data that must be flagged and eliminated by Factual’s systems.

Going Beyond Standard Location Targeting to Reach Mobile Audiences (Street Fight)
Annisa Farese: It’s important to focus on not just the reach of a geofence, but also on effectively targeting your business’s relevant mobile audiences. A little extra strategic effort goes a long way, and there is much to gain from leveraging the variety of data currently available and layering it appropriately to suit your campaign’s specific strategies and tactics.

Uncovering the Buffett Equation for Newspaper Survivability (Ebyline)
Does it have a circulation of 30,000 or less? Is it in a town with a population of less than 75,000? Does paid weekday circulation top 25% of the total population? If you answered “Yes” to all these questions you can sleep soundly knowing that, even if your newspaper hasn’t already been purchased by the second-richest man in America, it has a fighting chance. Here’s why.

Conference Notebook: Foursquare CRO Sees ‘Off the Charts’ Engagement With Native Ads (Street Fight)
In describing why Foursquare chose to build a native advertising product, the company’s chief revenue officer Steven Rosenblatt yesterday pointed to the difficulties with some mobile ad formats, like pop-ups, saying that it was really easy to screw up the mobile user’s experience with poor ad delivery. As a result, the company has instead moved ahead with its “promoted updates” native advertising product, which launched in August. Rosenblatt said that over 52% of the people who engage with ads are checking in within 24 hours.

Foursquare’s Yelp Problem (AllThingsD)
Peter Kafka: For Foursquare, the most important IPO of last year was Yelp. The good news is that the local reviews service has held up, price-wise, better than just about any other recent big-name Web IPO except for LinkedIn. The bad news for Foursquare is that, as far as the market is concerned, Yelp seems to be worth something in the $1.5 billion range, and not much more.

The Long, Slow Decline of Alt-Weeklies (Reuters)
Jack Shafer: Like its daily newspaper counterpart, the alt-weekly has enjoyed a terrible half-decade of plummeting revenues, circulation and page counts in the 100-plus markets currently served. One large chain that owned papers in Chicago, Washington, Atlanta, Charlotte and elsewhere filed for bankruptcy in 2008 and was eventually spun apart, but that financial disaster was as much about clueless proprietors overleveraging themselves as it was the decay of the alt-weekly business model.

Geographic Targeting In An Enhanced Campaign World (SearchEngineLand)
If you are a national company that has never tried to manage bids or budgets by locations, Enhanced Campaigns is a great feature to get you started examining how various locations affect your CPAs so you can start to bid them separately or even target the users differently by location.

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