Borrell Associates recently released a study painting a very
healthy picture for the future of local search. According to the study, local search revenues, which are expected to be about $1 billion in 2006, will grow to $1.8 billion in 2007, an 86 percent jump.Local search will remain a small share of the overall online ad spend, which, according to EMarketer, will hit $15.9 billion (search ad spending accounts for about 40 percent of this total, or $6.36 billion). But it’s growing fast, and marketers who haven’t yet added a local component to their search campaigns will find it easy to do so, now that Google and the other engines provide geo-targeting features. Local merchants and national marketers are realizing that searchers with local internet want relevant content and increasingly the savvy marketers are providing that content. Local search advertising doesn’t begin and end with the Google, Yahoo and MSN regular search results. Superpages and other online yellow page publishers have targeted local traffic. However analysts believe the killer app for local search will be mobile search. Google recently added the ability to create mobile ads optimized for the small screens of mobile devices to its Adwords platform and the other engines are also rolling out mobile advertising and/or content.
Marketers will need to retool their creative to take advantage of mobile ads, which use fewer characters than ads built for standard Web browsers. Google limits you to between 12 and 18 characters (depending on language used), with the destination URL or call link (which connects users with a phone number) appearing on the third line. Being able to squeeze a compelling message into this tiny character limit will doubtless be a challenge to many marketers, especially those running a large number of Adgroups with associated unique creative. Another critical task will be customizing one’s landing pages to the smaller limits of the mobile screen. Google has some very basic guidelines about rewriting such pages, and advises the use of XMHTML, WML, and CHTML, but the burden of making such pages attractive and usable on mobile devices falls upon the marketer.
Marketers will also need to think carefully about strategies to achieve top paid rankings on the smaller screens of mobile devices, which do not provide as many listings as are available on standard 1024 x 768 browser windows. Our own studies, as well as those done by third parties, have demonstrated that achieving top rankings provide enormous increases in scale over lower-tiered listings, and this factor will be augmented on the small screen, where tertiary listings will be demoted from the primary screen a mobile user sees to a secondary page. As long as the paid ads are relevant and accepted by searchers as such, we can expect the search engines to allocate nearly all the important screen real estate of mobile searches to paid listings. Bye bye organic results, and perhaps good riddance. Even in Google today, a search for any local service business such as plumber, roofing, dentist or lawyer will yield far better results based on the IP address localization that Google performs for only the paid listings.
While Google has taken the lead in rolling out mobile search, Yahoo and MSN have both announced that they intend to make mobile search integral parts of their ad platform. While it’s likely that there will be substantial similarities in the new creative and landing page requirements, you’ll still have to spend time and effort customizing campaigns for mobile devices, which can become very labor intensive. Make sure your in-house team or 3rd party SEM agency has the resources and expertise to optimize your search campaigns for mobile, so that you’re ready to take advantage of this new, rapidly expanding advertising platform. Mobile search is one of the areas where we are confident that if you build it (the content) they will come.
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