• by Phil Leggiere , May 30, 2007

As denizens of the first truly global medium, Web surfers are notoriously nomadic creatures. For all their wanderings, however, home, in the form of local news and content, remains where most Web consumers spend much of their virtual time, as Joe Sleeman, president of Websmart America, reminds us below. The problem, Sleeman argues, is that marketers have yet to fully leverage the possibilities of local content and behavior beyond keywords.

Behavioral Insider: What do you see as the largest untapped opportunities in local advertising?

Joe Sleeman: Local advertising is in many ways the most basic and most difficult kind of advertising to do well online. It's the most basic, because 'geo-targeting,' of course, is where direct response marketing's sweet spot has long been. But for online advertisers it's been surprisingly tough to crack, because publishers have thought, and still think, in terms of keywords being the panacea -- and that's not really the case. The challenge is how to tailor highly specific offers, creatives and landing pages based on what you know about local consumers. Geo-targeting will take you just so far -- but in my experience, you need to leverage more dimensions of data to make local targeting work.

BI: What role does behavioral data play in how you approach the local sphere?

Sleeman: There's been an amazing lack of interest paid so far to how local content is used. The prime example is local newspapers and other local news and information sources. Lots of Web users spend a majority of their time looking at local Web sites. But what we found was that local content was mostly still unexplored territory when it came to behavioral and even contextual targeting.

We've studied behavior patterns in the use of local content. Until very recently, targeting, if it broached local content at all, was about keywords only. In fact there's a rich amount of behavioral patterns related to in-market research and interest that can be gleaned from local content use, atop what we already know about demographics from zip code and IP addresses. We combine keyword behavior, local newspaper and directory browsing, purchases and other behavior. What we're doing is taking what began for us as a contextual ad serving methodology, serving ads by targetable links inside news section content, and combining it with as much behavioral data as we can gather. The idea is to gradually improve not only the relevancy of the ad messaging, but to align the landing page to the user's demonstrated interests.

BI: What types of advertisers stand to gain from adopting a wider approach to local advertising?

Sleeman: The focus can pay off for locally rooted businesses, regional or national advertisers. The key point is that even with a medium as obviously global as the Internet, local media is where key information is gathered on which key buying decisions are based. Local doesn't necessarily mean small. In fact, local media for most Americans encompasses media in the top 75 metro markets. A local newspaper could be a rural town gazette with a circulation of a thousand -- or The New York Times. We can target any newspaper section such as business, real estate, fashion, lifestyle or automobile.

BI: How does local content browsing and similar behaviors relate to wider patterns of consumer behavior?

Sleeman: If someone is becoming interested in purchasing real estate or a real-estate-related service like insurance, they will likely at some point do 'formal' research by going to the leading financial sites. Certainly they'll use the search engines as well. But it's even more likely that they'll be doing a lot of scanning of the local real estate section for news, classifieds and other content. There's evidence that by paying attention to what they're doing locally you have an early warning system about the topics that are important to them. You can see the same pattern in autos as well. It's not that local content usage will demonstrate by itself depth of interest in a product category. You want to relate it to a range of other behaviors. But it's quite often where they'll go first and most frequently.

BI: At this stage, what are the performance metrics you're using?

Sleeman: We are in the midst of organizing all the data -- but it's very clear to us that combining local media data dramatically increases click-throughs. But much more important, it's been increasing overall conversion rates by 5 and 10 times, versus just relying on pay-per-click keywords.