Google Local Listing Ads
Google recently announced it would start testing a new text ad format called local listing ads. These ads are available to small businesses with physical locations and will appear at the top of a search results page when a geographic query is made to an advertiser’s related category. Once again Google is pushing their traditional organic results further down the page.
Unlike Ad Words ads, the local listing ads will not include a title or promotional ad text. Instead, the local listing ads will show the company name, address, phone number and URL. Another departure from the Ad Words model is that these ads will be sold for a flat monthly fee based on the company’s location and business category. The cost of these ads is unconfirmed, but it’s expected they will range anywhere from $40 – $200 per month depending on the competitive nature of the category.
There are certain prerequisites, such as the advertiser must have claimed their location in Google’s local business center through pin verification. Currently, these ads are only available to advertisers in San Francisco or San Diego, with plans to roll out to more U.S. cities after this testing period. The initial month will be free of charge as long as they have verified their listing.
One of the more intriguing functions will be the included call tracking. Google will be assigning a call tracking number that will forward to the business line of the advertiser. These calls can then be tracking in the Local Business Center interface. The only knock on this, is that each call will start with a Google Whisper indicating “this caller brought to you by Google’, but at the end of the day that seems worth it to gain more transparency into the ads performance.
Overall this is a very interesting and an almost expected release from Google considering the amount of real estate they have given to the map listings on the main page results. However, there are still too many questions than answers at this point such as:
Will customer support finally be available?
If it’s a flat rate how will multiple advertisers be ranked?
What interference with Ad Words will this have?
on October 12th, 2009 at 12:07 pm
Erik – i think this is a direct response from the negative experience small business owners are having when using Reach Local and other firms like them. If users have a bad experience with Google b/c of a poor experience with a third party, Google can’t afford not to directly address with an offering.
Hopefully small business owners will take advantage of this offering and utilize Google’s resources to manage this directly, providing a much greater ROI without paying excessive mark ups on Google’s CPCs.
on October 14th, 2009 at 3:51 pm
Those are very good points Alex. It will be interesting to see how Google pushes interest to the small business owners without the massive sales force a Reach Local has available. It looks Google has already created some incentivised options and as you mentioned, the greatest one being no more excessive mark ups.