comScore: The State of the Local Search Nation
December 13, 2011
On day 2 of the BIA/Kelsey ILM 2011 conference, Gillian Heltai, Senior Director at comScore presented a series of interesting data points to attendees:
- Total online searches grew 9% year-over-year to exceed 19.3 billion searches in September 2011
- 2.8 billion of those searches were “local” (a growth of 9% from last year). Local searches growth is decelerating
- IYP (Internet Yellow Pages) searches are down 20% year-over-year
- 1.7 billion click-thrus to directories and regional/local content sites were generated from search in sept 2011
- Top organic search terms by click-through rates: driving directions, white pages, yellow pages, maps, los angeles
- 10% of US display ads are locally targeted
- 3 of every 4 mobile subscribers own a device with GPS capability
- Over one third own a smartphone
- Mobile search usage grew 25% year-over-year with 26% penetration in September 2011
- Search is the top activity of mobile browser users. Social networking is second.
- 88 million mobile subscribers access local content on a mobile device, up 28% from a year ago.
- Nearly 40% of mobile users access local content on their device in September 2011, compared with 75% for smartphone owners
- 16.3 million smartphone owners scanned a QR code, 43% in a retail store, 42% from a product packaging.
As I get prepared for two exciting days at London’s sold-out Local Social Summit 2011 this week, BIA/Kelsey just released an early taste of their latest U.S. Local Media Annual Forecast.
Highlights:
- Total local advertising revenues for 2011 will be $135.9 billion, down from the $136.2 billion it forecast earlier this year
- Traditional media segments such as Yellow Pages and newspapers are experiencing the largest downward revisions
- U.S. local online/digital advertising revenues will rise to $23.3 billion in 2011, compared with $22.3 billion predicted earlier this year
- Local online/ digital advertising revenues will be 17.2 percent of total local advertising revenues in 2011, up from the earlier forecast of 16.4 percent. By 2015 that share will increase to 25.4 percent, up from the 24.7 percent originally predicted
- The overall local media market will grow slowly over the next five years, at a compound annual growth rate of 1.7 percent, reaching $149.4 billion by 2015
The rest/details of the forecast will be revealed at their next conference ILM West 2011, in downtown San Francisco, December 12 to 14. I will be attending the conference. BTW, I just reserved my hotel using Hotwire and I found a 4-star hotel within walking distance for $109/night. See you there!
I will be moderating a panel on day one of the next Local Social Summit happening in London on November 9 and 10 (it’s a two-day event this year). The panel is titled The Right Place At The Right Time: How The Real-Time Web Influences The “local” World.
Its description: The rise of the real-time Web is well documented.Propelled by both the social networking revolution and mobile device ubiquitousness, we’re seeing the birth of new user services and business opportunities. In this panel, we will explore the time element in the local/social Web and will try to discover what kind of content works well in real-time, what are the benefits for consumers and what kind of business models can be deployed to leverage the
“time” dimension.
My panelists:
- Ryan Mac Jones, Founder at We&Co
- David Ambrose, Mobile Lead at Travelzoo
- Phil Leggetter, Developer Evangelist at Pusher
- Stefano Diemmi at Proximitips/Buongiorno
People that have been reading this blog and following my Twitter feed know that I’ve been interested in the real-time (sometimes called the Alive Web)and the temporal Web for a few years now.
On day two, I’m also on a panel titled Can Social Media Be Outsourced? headed by Jonathan Ewert from Codero. I’m looking forward to that discussion as well!
It should be an excellent conference with speakers from Yelp, Foursquare, European Directories, Decarta, Mueller-Medien, the BBC, in addition to Greg Sterling, Dennis Yu and Perry Evans.
The organizers have provided me with a 20% discount to my readers but I hear there are less than 20 tickets left. So, hurry up if you want to join us. I will be in London the whole week. If you want to meet, ping me at seb AT needium.com.
Today’s Strategic Imperatives For Directory Publishers
September 27, 2011
Flick picture by disoculated
Yesterday, I gave an interview to the Globe & Mail about Canada’s Yellow Media / Yellow Pages Group, the incumbent directory publisher and my former employer (I worked there from 1999 to 2007). Even with the challenges they’re facing, I’m still a fan of the company (and of the industry in general) but the interview gave me the opportunity to put in writing what I think are the core strategic imperatives today for any directory publisher, not just Yellow Media. The list won’t surprise anyone in the industry but it’s always good to remind ourselves what they are.
- Change the culture. “Internet culture” must truly permeate every aspect of the organization. Concepts like speed of execution, innovation, quick iterations, coopetition, risk-taking, failing fast must become second nature (other people on Twitter & Google+ suggested “internet culture” also meant constant learning, openness, willingness to help each other out, adaptability to constant change, sharing, crowdsourcing, diversity, immediacy, learning, and expectation of access)
- The sales force. I believe the sales force is now the major asset of all directory publishers and this sales force needs to be able to sell print directory products as well as a variety of online products including third-party ones like Google AdWords or Facebook advertising. This means recruiting and training are critical success factors. I use to believe the brand was a major asset but not anymore.
- Reinvent the Print. I still believe print business directories have legs and they won’t die tomorrow (and by the way, stop it with “Yellow Pages are dead” please, nothing ever dies, it just becomes niche). Even I still use the neighborhood book once in a while. But the book needs to be reinvented to become more locally relevant, more about the consumer. As Francis Barker (SVP at Dex Media at the time) said in 2004 at a BIA/Kelsey conference, print books design should be influenced by online local search patterns/usage. I’ll add that they now should be influenced by mobile local search/discovery apps. On a related note, book distribution in apartment and office building should be improved to avoid the PR disaster pictures like this.
- Continue investing in the Web. Beef up your dev and product management team, invest in R&D, try things. Facebook has shown that you can continue innovating even when you have huge consumer usage and ad revenues.
- Focus on mobile. The Web is extremely fragmented and some players like Google and Facebook have managed to capture gigantic market shares. There’s probably a bigger opportunity to support the franchise by focusing on mobile and launching various vertical apps. Directory publishers need to invest and build up their mobile team and technology.
- Get serious about social media. I’m obviously biased because of the work I’m doing on Needium, but the time for experiments in social media is over. This is serious business now both from a consumer and an advertiser point of view.
Am I forgetting anything?
I’m a little late covering this (the news was announced on Monday) but the Yellow Pages Association just announced a rebranding as the Local Search Association.
From the release:
The Yellow Pages Association (YPA) today unveiled a new name – Local Search Association – alongside a new visual identity, reflecting the industry’s transition from print publisher to a provider of local search services to small businesses and their consumers.
The announcement is an important step in the right direction for the industry but is not surprising. Major directory publishers had started making the transition from “directory” to “local search” as early as 2002-2003 (I was part of the team that made the change at Yellow Pages Group). Most of them now behave like large local search agencies who also own media properties. So, the name fits perfectly the new strategy (by the way, anyone else thinks it’s amazing that the name was still available?)
I would have liked to be at their conference this week, to take the pulse of the attendees regarding the change. As I told Neg Norton, the Local Search Association president, when we discussed the announcement, the real litmus test will be when new local search industry stakeholders become members en masse on both sides of the spectrum. First the big players like Google, Microsoft, Facebook and maybe Twitter. And then, small local search engine marketing agencies. These guys will infuse new cultural strains and help propel the association forward. But a clear “what’s in it for them” needs to be presented and event/membership competition in the very sexy geo-space is fierce (I counted at least 12 different geo and local conferences in 2011). I think they can do it but there’s a lot of work ahead.
At the BIA/Kelsey ILM East 2011 conference this morning, we heard from Lior Ron, the Group Product Manager for Google Places (including Maps and Hotpot).
A couple of interesting information points came out:
- Google Places contains 50M places around the world
- They felt they were missing “people” in the local equation and that’s why they launched Google Hotpot
- Hotpot is all about organizing the web around people and places and is a local recommendation engine.
- Hotpot now has generated more than 3M reviews and ratings (see this BIA/Kelsey post from last week for more data points)
Lior Ron said that Hotpot is not about Google building another silo or reviews site. It’s about collecting short signals to enable better ranking/relevancy. A few conference attendees were not convinced by that statement.
At the BIA/Kelsey conference yesterday, I had the opportunity to sit down with the two co-founders of SeniorChecked, Chris Spanos and Scott Knowles. Both ex-AOLers with solid experience in the local space, they’ve built this vertical local directory site targeting Seniors and their family.
Their mission is to help reduce the risk and incidence of fraud against Seniors by connecting them to trusted local businesses. Local service providers pay them $700 a year for a detailed review which eventually gets them a seal of approval from SeniorChecked. This is the list of things they investigate before approving a merchant.
Obviously a great vertical with the aging baby boomers population (Yellow Pages Group had published a print directory on the topic a few years ago) and an important life event that involves many business categories, Scott and Chris have stumbled upon a better business model than I had expected before sitting down with them. This is not a business directory play, this is a “seal of approval” play.
Why is this an important distinction? If you’re building a vertical business directory, you need to sell advertising AND convince users to come to your site. A very difficult challenge for any startup. But if you’re selling a trusted seal, advertisers will “sell” consumers to your brand. They will promote the seal in-store and in their brochures (SeniorChecked provides advertisers with a promotion package that includes stickers, logo, etc.). Consumers might eventually come back to the SeniorChecked.com site searching in the directory to make sure that the company is legit but this is not the core business. Because a seal is a simple content “atom”, it also enables SeniorChecked to distribute their approved merchants in other directory sites.
The long term picture for SeniorChecked is also very interesting. They’ve basically built a platform which enables them to launch other verticals where trust plays a big role. They want to build these verticals themselves or partner with other people, as a technology provider, to launch them.
This is not the first company to try a “seal of approval” (ValueStar comes to mind) but by verticalizing, SeniorChecked might be taking the right road to success. I’ll be following them.
The Evolution of Merchant "Presence"
February 2, 2011
Flickr picture by Andrew Atzert
Fifteen years ago, if a merchant wanted to make sure he’d be found when people were doing shopping research, it was very easy. You simply needed to have a free basic listing in your main business category in the print Yellow Pages of your city. Advertisers could extend that presence in different cities or business categories by buying additional basic business listings and if you wanted to stand out when consumers were doing comparison shopping, you could make your listing standout by making it bold or buying an informational listing (lines of text) or a display ad (graphics + text). Some people were trying to game the system by changing their name to AAAAA Joe Plumber and appear higher in the listings but buying a display ad would insure a ranking improvement in your category. Life was simple and/but choice was limited. Directory publishers were making tons of money with huge profit margins.
Things certainly have changed since then.
Fast forward to the search engine era (2000-2010), search is the main method people use to do comparison shopping now. For small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), having a presence in the search engine era means having a Web site but ranking in search engine results pages is very random. It’s probably the equivalent of a Yellow Pages basic listing. The discipline of search engine optimization (SEO) was invented to try to improve Web site ranking in organic search results. This is probably the equivalent of print bold listings (white hat SEO) and AAA merchant names (black hat SEO). And if you want to make sure you appear above everyone else, you bid on specific business keywords in, for example, Google AdWords (search engine marketing or SEM). This is the equivalent of the Yellow Pages display in the Google era. The search engine from Mountain View is now making tons of money with huge profit margins.
The complexity of this search ecosystem means most small merchants need to rely on service providers for Web site building, SEO and SEM, three products of very high interest in the Yellow Pages space in the last 2-3 years.
But that’s not all. In the search engine era, local search sites have multiplied as well. Merchants need to make sure that their basic listing information is everywhere, that it’s correct and is the same everywhere. That’s quite a challenge given the dozens (hundreds?) of sites out there. Companies like Universal Business Listing, GetListed and Localeze have risen to the challenge to help SMBs. Search Engine Watch recently said “Your address is the new link”.
But lo and behold, Google’s search query volume seems to be plateauing. Compete says it has dropped 0.6% from December 2009 to December 2010.
Things are changing yet again…
Enter the social media era (2010-2020?), the conversation age. Consumers are now spending more time using Facebook and Twitter than anything else on the Web, even beating e-mail. As I write this, Facebook claims they have more than 500 million active users per month. 25 billion tweets (messages on Twitter) were sent in 2010.The rise of these powerful social networking and communications tools means that merchants need to be present there as well.
So, what does SMB presence means in the social media world? It mostly means building a Facebook page and creating a Twitter account. It’s actually fairly easy to do and many of them have done it already. I can also tell you every local media company and SEO/SEM firm is thinking of offering (or already does) the creation of a social media presence for small merchants who are not there already. We’ll probably see the arrival of technology companies enabling mass-creation of those pages/accounts. This is the “basic listing” of social media.
Next, how can merchants be found in social media? They’re able to buy Facebook ads or Twitter promoted ads (tweets, trends, accounts) and we’re already seeing the arrival of technology providers to enable campaign management (like we saw search engine marketing). This will be the equivalent of Google AdWords for the social media era.
What about organic “search results”? How do smart SMBs get found “organically” in social media? They join the conversation. They broadcast information about their store, they reply to consumer comments and questions, they identify potential customers and invite them to their store. Small merchants are all about relationship-building and the human touch. They just need to port this to social media but they need help. They need to understand the tone that’s required but mostly they don’t necessarily have the time to engage in and monitor social media. They need support and they need to filter the noise.
I think this space is going to be huge. As SMBs easily create their basic presence en-masse on Twitter and Facebook (BIA/Kelsey says close to 50% of SMBs have created a Facebook page and close to 20% on Twitter), they’ll be wondering what to do next. This is the space we’re trying to crack with Needium, helping SMBs figure what happens next organically after the basic social media listing. By identifying business opportunities in social media, by monitoring merchant name mentions and by offering white-label community management services, we’ve shown small merchants that there’s value in social media and exciting business life after the account creation. We hope you’ll be with us along for the ride!
Yellow Pages Industry Makes it Easier to Opt-Out of Print Delivery
February 1, 2011
The Yellow Pages industry today launched an upgraded website at www.yellowpagesoptout.com that allows consumers nationwide to easily manage the delivery of phone directories. The website, developed by the Yellow Pages Association YPA and the Association of Directory Publishers ADP, gives consumers a single location to select which phone directories they receive, or to stop directory delivery altogether.
What it means: with the new Website, US residents can now easily opt-out (or select delivery) of any print Yellow Pages book delivered to their door in one convenient location. 158 publishers are in the site database. To opt-out, simply enter your zip code on the home page. You then get a page showing all directories delivered in your zip code with pictures of the covers to eliminate confusion. The association does a nightly update to directory publishers.
I think this improves the opt-out process drastically. It’s important that the industry self-regulates given the pressure coming from various cities to create regional directory delivery law (read about the Seattle situation). In a discussion yesterday with Neg Norton, President of the YPA, I suggested that the association should penalize publishers who don’t respect the opt-out (even by mistake) and this should be publicized to the public. I think the industry should also crack down on bad distribution practices. Everyone has seen those piles of Yellow Pages books being dropped on the first floor of an apartment or an office building. It took me two seconds to find someone who had recently posted a picture on Twitter. These inefficient distribution methods hurt the industry.
By the way, if you live in Canada, the opt-out form is here.
