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Richard Rosen, FastCall411 founder and CEO, is an expert in the calling applications industry and its relationship to local search. With more than 20 years of direct marketing experience, Rosen served as Vice President, Business Development, at both Jambo and CallSource, each a pioneering firm in the pay-per-call and call measurement spaces, respectively.

At Jambo, Rosen led business development, marketing, sales, public relations and product development. During his tenure, he helped define Jambo's pay-per-call and phone-centric product initiatives, and created and launched JAN, the Jambo Advertising Network, as a vehicle to communicate the company's value proposition to local advertisers and publishers. At CallSource, he spearheaded initiatives to provide call tracking to AutoTrader.com, Cars.com, Verizon Yellow Pages, AOL, Google, Switchboard, ReachLocal, Perform Local, and Citysearch, among others. Rosen writes frequently on pay-per-call and call tracking issues, and is a frequent speaker at industry events.

Rosen founded FastCall411 ( www.fastcall411.com) to improve the experience for consumers in need of local service providers. FastCall411 will deliver better local advertising results to merchants seeking new business while offering a superior partnership model and improved economic yields for partners. Over time, FastCall411 will extend its model to mobile search, directory assistance and other input devices.

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Features

A Fitting Fix to Local Search: Why the “Less is More” Approach Provides Real Pay-Per-Call Benefit

Written on
Sep 12, 2006 
Author
Richard Rosen  |
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A Fitting Fix to Local Search: Why the “Less is More” Approach Provides Real Pay-Per-Call Benefit

Get Beyond the ‘Local’ in Local Search — More Relevance, Please

There are more important, but largely ignored, criteria that make a merchant relevant to a searcher.

Foremost among them: the merchant should be in business, answer the phone, and should want the consumer’s business. That seems obvious, but it’s far from reality — online directory listings include too many bad phone numbers, mis-categorized merchants, and companies not seeking new business. All that is required to be listed with an Internet Yellow Pages site is name, address and phone. More than 5,600 plumbers in Los Angeles satisfy that requirement.

With so much competition for consumers, search engines can’t continue to ignore this problem. Consumers want to find what they’re looking for quickly and easily, and will drop publishers and directories whose information is stale or, worse, unreliable.

Pay-per-call offers search providers the ability to keep track of which companies want phone leads and which don’t — based on the percentage of calls each merchant answers, or doesn’t. By combining that information with a variety of other relevancy factors — including type of business, geography, service specialties, if it’s a residential or commercial address, among others — search providers can more accurately identify the merchants most likely to be relevant to a particular consumer.

This involves a major shift in the current local search architecture and algorithms. The technology now allows search engines to go beyond the click and measure the phone interaction with merchants. This is ultimately more work and expense on the part of the search engines, but it’s essential — it’s no longer enough to simply aggregate as many listings as possible.

Why go to all this trouble? This data is a differentiator in an ever more competitive landscape. Filtering search results increases the likelihood that a consumer will find what he or she needs — which, in turn, makes it more likely that the consumer will elect to make contact, that the merchant will in fact provide the product or service sought, and that a transaction will follow — success all around.

Advertisers want qualified leads of motivated consumers and will quickly judge providers delivering poor leads. Click fraud is fueling the market’s perception that Internet leads are poor, or worse, fraudulent. The industry needs to get ahead of the quality issue, and relevance is the answer.

This focus on relevancy will significantly differentiate the first search engine to bring the solution to market and enable local search to reach its potential of bringing millions of dollars in local advertising online. What’s at stake? I believe that the battle for all search will be won or lost over local.





Reader Comments.

I couldn’t agree with you more on what current search engines are providing. Pinpoint Pages local search solution is consumer driven. PinpointPages.com empowers both the business web site owner and the visitors. They are both in the driver’s seat and in complete control. The Internet is hailed as uniting the world, but as an entrepreneur I’m working to unite community and commerce locally. Every business, nonprofit organization and service provider in the states is invited to list business basics for FREE at http://www.PinpointPages.com. The most distinctive feature of this local search Web site is that individual organizations can log in and change their information at will, so they are in control of their own listing. Updated information is immediately available to the public.

Posted by Martin Garcia | 3:25 pm on September 12, 2006.

That’s your answer? See who picks up? Yes it’s a discriminator that may work particularly well for the plumber analogy, but substantially less valuable for finding a quality interior designer, construction company, any retail outlet, etc.

Posted by Bob | 12:26 pm on September 13, 2006.

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