Take a look at your copy of the Yellow Pages. You know, that big book that’s collecting dust on your shelf. It’s getting smaller with each passing year, isn’t it? And that’s not because businesses are disappearing. Consumers have just changed the way they look for information, using the Web as the main tool to search for businesses in their area. In fact, of the 300 million Internet searches that occur each day, about 75 million are for local businesses and associations.
Typically, if you wanted to advertise online to Internet surfers on sites like Google, you had to launch a national campaign and hope that you were reaching some end-users within your marketplace.
A new service, offered by Reach-Local — a Los Angeles company — is offering businesses the opportunity to locally target their Internet advertising. Able to distinguish where a Web search is coming from based on Internet Protocol addresses, the company now makes it possible for local and regional businesses to build a targeted online, pay-per-click all-text advertising campaign.
A unique platform takes a person step by step through the ad creation process. With templates and drop down menus, businesses can specify exactly which areas or regions they want to target. The goal of any ad should be to drive traffic to the company’s site. For example, your ad would pop up in a search engine should the key word search match the description you provided and the searcher’s IP address be in an area you targeted.
ReachLocal places ads on Google, Yahoo and Verizon’s SuperPages, which alone gets 15 million visits and 9 million unique visits per month. The ReachLocal advertising platform is also able to place ads on thousands of other sites across the Internet and can limit the display of those ads to people living within the geographic areas you want to target. These ads are integrated directly into the content of those sites and can either be text-based or graphical in nature.
Bruce Mishkin, company spokes-person, says, “Businesses can select the DMA level or towns where they would like their pay-per-view ads to appear.”
As for the costs of the service, he says that the minimum expenditure is $100 per month but that the system is predictive. Once your campaign is structured, if you did not allocate enough money to cover the geographical regions you’ve selected, you can either increase your monthly budget or decrease your reach by honing in on specific towns in a major region. Once the budget is established, ReachLocal informs a business where its ads will appear. Mishkin explains that ReachLocal provides complete tracking tools via discrete phone numbers and e-mail addresses along with weekly reports so that advertisers can see what type of response they are getting.
This service is relatively new, having just launched in October. It currently isn’t being offered by any other companies. For a complete demonstration, contact Mishkin at (732) 316-1144.
