Going Beyond Standard Location Targeting to Reach Mobile Audiences
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…
What SMBs Need to Know About Facebook’s News Feed Redesign
In the hopes of creating a better user experience (and ultimately more monetization opportunities), Facebook recently overhauled the design and functionality of its news feed — aiming to become the “personalized newspaper” of the digital age. The redesigned layout will include bigger photos, maps and news articles and users can now sort through feeds based on interests — so SMBs currently managing a page should definitely adjust the way they approach their Facebook marketing and creative strategy…
Why Local Online Publishers Should Also Be Designing Merchants’ Sites
One of the most sustainable sources of income for local digital publishers ought to be web design and hosting for their local customers. Web design and hosting has counted for 20% of my company’s total annual revenue for the last five years. It’s a natural fit for publishers in so many ways, and yet I see very few who offer it. They’re missing out big time…
Defining the Local Coefficient: A Conversation with Yelp
A growing chunk of physical purchases are influenced online. And the path to purchase increasingly weaves between different screens. But for conversions, it’s all about offline. The question is how long this will remain to be the case. Out of sheer curiosity, Yelp VP Mike Ghaffary ventured to quantify this…
Publishers Could Gain More Control as Browsers Curb Behavioral Ads
As limits arise on behavioral ads, endemic sites (or sites with actionable user data) can essentially become ad networks. If browser limits mean that Cars.com can no longer sell its data, then the opportunity exists for the company itself to develop a platform to sell audience extension…
Limits on Behavioral Ads Could Bring Higher CPMs for Publishers
On an Internet without online behavioral advertising, publishers with a premium audience will be in higher demand, and this will result over time in increased CPMs and increased revenue. It will be a step back in time to where premium publishers and ad networks (not exchanges) were handling most of the media buys.
How to Ensure That Your Geofence Is Sized Correctly
Location-based push campaigns have a lot of upside, from satisfied customers to higher ROI. But it can be a thin line that separates a successful campaign from one that leaves mobile users extremely annoyed — so really homing in on how to deliver the right geofence to optimize your campaign is crucial…
How to Create a Great Vertical Directory
It’s tough for a start-up to break into the top echelon of local search players and become a one-size-fits-all solution like Google or YP. The great opportunity that exists in the space lies in serving special interests or special use cases better than anyone has before. Foursquare and Yelp are highly visible examples of this, but other very successful, vertically oriented directories exist, flying mostly under our radar…
What Do Google’s Enhanced Campaigns Mean for SMBs?
To wildly mixed reactions, Google last week announced a major redesign to its pervasive AdWords SEM platform. Known as Enhanced Campaigns, the redesign will force advertisers to run a single, converged — though conditionally governed — campaign across desktop, mobile, and tablet devices…
After Boom and Bust, How Will the Discount Economy Evolve?
The discount industry experienced 2012 as a major turning point. In the past 12 months, the deal provider landscape shook out even more, with the consolidation of many deals sites and the decline of some industry giants. Given the changed landscape, here are a few predictions about where the local offer and voucher space is heading…
Big Data and Local Search: The Netflix Precedent
We’ve entered an era when product decisions can be made not by analysis of demographics or user testing but by extremely fine-tuned measurements of current user activities. For local search, the question becomes just how many of our passive online activities can be converted into data points to be examined for purposes of marketing and product development?
Why Mom-and-Pops Will No Longer Pay for ‘Social Media Management’
The social media hype bubble has burst, and most very small businesses have not realized their ROI in social media. They’re not willing to pay my company — or anyone else — hundreds of dollars a month to market their company on Facebook or Twitter. Instead they are diverting those dollars to pay per click options, SEO, optimizing their websites for conversion and mobile, or targeted local media advertising…
Survey ‘Paywalls’ May Not Be as Good as They Sound for Local Media
While surveys may be a good source of revenue, it’s not a long-term solution for local news sites:There is an inherent supply-and-demand issue — not very different from the one that arises with online display ads. As more and more publishers adopt Google Consumer Surveys, Google can begin dropping its publisher payout because it has enough supply…
Understanding the Local Consumer’s Online Path to Purchase
Consumers are using the web to become highly informed about everything they buy, and what they see (or don’t) about a business online affects whether they purchase from that company. It’s much more complex and time-consuming for small businesses to reach these digital consumers than ever before, so it’s up to solutions providers to help clients create and sustain a total web presence…
6 Things I Learned About Local By Failing in Local
I remember the bright-eyed conversation I had with my eventual partner Ed Lucero that sparked Tackable. It was 2009, and Instagram was being born somewhere else. The iPhone was brand new, and developers were racing to build apps that captured the power of local information. There are two worlds out there, I told Ed, the physical world and the digital world. Overlay the two, and things get interesting. Imagine!