Businesses spent $132.8 billion in the U.S. last year on local ads and about $68.4 billion -- or 46.5% -- aimed to drive telephone leads, according to a BIA/Kelsey report that highlights the trend toward call-based ads. Fueled by mobile devices, U.S. small businesses spent $41.1 billion on local advertising. Of that, $24.7 billion -- or 60.1% -- of all SMBs earmarked budgets for generating telephone leads, said BIA/Kelsey analyst Matt Booth. About 11% of companies now use call tracking to follow leads from the Web, up 5% in one year. "Call conversion from a local search on a desktop local is 7%, once the landing page is viewed, compared with 57% from a mobile device," Booth said. "Mobile applications can drive up to 62% of telephone calls." By 2015, the number of local search queries on desktop and mobile devices will "equal each other." Booth forecasts call volumes from search -- organic and paid traffic --will pale in comparison to calls generated from mobile devices by 2016. BIA/Kelsey forecasts 70 billion calls from the Internet and mobile to all U.S. businesses that year, with most of them coming from mobile devices. The report, titled "Call-Based Ads: Eliminating the Unknown From Advertising," provides a historical context, explains the foundation for growth and provides market forecasts. It also highlights data from BIA/Kelsey's ongoing "Local Commerce Monitor" study, highlighting that small-business advertisers report a phone call, even more than a personal visit to their store, can become the most valuable new business lead. The research firm expects to release the full report next week at a conference in San Francisco. The report also suggests that query volume will enable downstream businesses to sell product and services, as well as generate telephone calls. Booth said call-based advertising businesses need the ability to redirect calls, enabling the growth to parallel the paid-search market. This media grew supported by queries or searches on categories, such as cars or plumbing. He estimates that about 22% of all call traffic will flow through paid-search listings. Booth said that in time, mobile searches will reflect city site, local and offline. The conversion of category calls will grow from 6% to 12% by 2016. Google will also drive growth. Earlier this year, Google began offing a service that splits the keyword bid between calls and clicks. The bid per call allows marketers to bid for phone calls, as well as clicks, when Google serves search ads on computers and tablets. Booth said the algorithm enables marketers to optimize performance across leads. "With this service, I expect Google to drive this call-based ad market," he said. The average U.S.-based business received 10.9 calls per month from desktop search last year and 34.7 calls per month from mobile, including mobile search. In 2013, the average U.S.-based business will receive 13.8 calls per month as a result of desktop search and 80.9 calls from mobile, according to the report. An influx of calls will create challenges. While the research shows that between 10% and 30% of calls are high-quality lead-based calls to a business, the massive amount of incoming calls -- combined with a high percentage of unwanted calls -- opens up issues related to analytics and call quality.
LG Electronics will use natural language processing to support a voice search service for its smartphones running on Google's Android operating system. Quick Voice will support 11 applications with audio features for Web search such as text, maps and weather. The move should become a wake-up call to search engine marketers who will need to rethink how they optimize Web sites and paid-search campaigns. The Quick Voice feature will initially launch this month in South Korea, joining a growing market spearheaded by Apple with the introduction last fall of Siri for the iPhone 4S. It's unclear how quickly LG will introduce the feature into other markets. Voice search continues to become the natural progression to simplify the request of information across platforms and devices, according to BIA/Kelsey analyst Matt Booth. "Google ran a very advanced voice search 411 business for years at Goog411, even taking out billboard advertisements," he said. "They were really after a large database repository of voice searches that continue to improve voice search queries. We think voice will be playing a pivotal role across Android devices." Booth said these announcements are early indicators that the market is primed to take off, and in four to five years, voice search will become as ubiquitous as turn-by-turn directions on mobile. Quick Voice will support Android 4 updates on the LG Optimus Vu this month, along with the Optimus LTE 2 in July. As a smartphone maker, LG might have set a precedent by introducing voice search for its phones, but it's not the first. Earlier this month, Apple said it would expand Siri to the iPad this fall with the release of iOS 6. About 1 billion of the world's population own smartphones, said Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt at a conference in Israel. He delivered the message to explain the growth of smartphones and how the device can reduce the gap between those who have access to the world's information on the Internet and those who do not.
The subject of analytics and measurement is one of the most critical areas to your ongoing strategy and tactical development. By acting in a participatory manner toward search, social, and content marketing, your business gains equity in visibility, trust, authoritativeness, direct revenue generation, and awareness, among many other factors. Measurement of real-time content is not so much about real-time as it is about measuring within a tighter frame of recency. Many marketers believe that acting and measuring in real-time means taking on a harried and almost panicked approach, when this is far from the case. We are not just talking about “right now” when it comes to measuring your real-time performance. The last hour, last day, last week, and last month also provide insight into what is currently happening with your content marketing efforts. Taking a real-time view of analytics also means that you will need to strike a balance with how you measure more current flows, as opposed to historical analytics. Most marketers are heavily focused on historical data -- in other words, what they have received over longer periods of time, and data that may be 2 months old or older. By focusing just the history of keyword returns, and the history of traffic flow, they may be missing out on the bigger picture of what is buzzing around their content beehive. Remember that a significant percentage of searches in Google have never been searched before, and the only way to capture some of this action is to monitor within a shorter window of recency. And this type of measurement doesn’t just benefit search, it benefits social interaction as well, and helps you find more current connections to your audience. Remember -- keywords are connections to people, and knowing the current language through analytics (both onsite and offsite) helps you reach them. With this approach in mind, here are some additional considerations for ramping up to a real-time view of content analytics: Start viewing “people as people” rather than “people as data.” One of the worst sins of modern Internet marketers is that they typically view people as a data point. This might involve cornering a person into a spreadsheet as a “unique visitor,” a keyword referral, or other traffic stat. Remember that your visitors and audience are people (you can ignore the robots for now), and in many cases they have a search intent, or a problem they are trying to solve. This is often a problem in the way that analytics providers are set up, but the good news is that some providers are trying to tell you more about “who” your audience really is. Remember that real-time data means nothing without a knowledgeable human to translate it into action. If you are checking out your data within recency parameters, it is important that it is analyzed by the right people. These are the people who write content, those who interact in social spaces, and those who optimize content. These roles should have at least some direct access to data, because gatekeeping the data only prevents them from doing their job in a timely manner. Use the best real-time analytics tool of all - your brain. For all of the talk about the wonders of analytics and measurement, there is no greater tool than your brain to make sense of all the data. Your brain contains the key link to interpreting data into actionable insights, and is the connective element between your business goals and your data. Remember Avinash Kaushik’s 10/90 rule. Just as your brain is the most important tool of all, Kaushik recommends spending 10% of your analytics budget on tools, and 90% on the brains that you will need to make sense of it. Even if you believe that your expensive new analytics widget is the best thing that ever happened to your business, you will not be able to use and interpret it properly without the right amount of brainpower. Distribute your data and insights throughout your organization. Be sure to spread your findings to other parts of your organization. In some cases, forwarding your data to someone with more specific knowledge can help turn it into an actionable insight. Consider forwarding relevant data to product managers, sales associates, customer service representatives, hiring organizations within your company, and your IT and creative teams, among many others. Use a variety of sources to measure what you are getting. Also remember that a single tool won’t cut it anymore. Use your onsite analytics, but utilize quantitative measurement tools on third-party social sites as well.
Remember search? Search was the darling of the Internet advertising space. It garnered a huge portion of the ad dollars dedicated to online (~40%) and was dominated by a single player (Google). Everywhere you turned there was an article written about search. There was always a new start-up that was trying to use search data, or improve upon search results. Everyone wanted to be in search. That feels like a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. Of course these days it’s all about social, video and mobile. Search is an after-thought because everyone has basically ceded the category to Google and is looking for the next area where they can still grab something of a foothold. Is that the right strategy? If everyone has ceded the business to Google, where’s the innovation going to come from? Search is an enormous piece of the interaction pie. There are still the areas of social search, video search, mobile search and even search on the dashboard of the car that are up for grabs. Search on the interface of the next generation TV sets or within the set-top box for Cable TV are also a possibility. These are areas where search can still emerge as an innovation and where a competitor could feasibly challenge Google. Where will the next round of innovation come from? Siri is probably the only truly innovative competitor to traditional search and Apple is aggressively going to try and put Siri on all your devices, as well as into the dashboard of your car. Siri could become a Trojan horse for Apple to get into non-native Apple devices if they play their cards right, creating apps that allow you to voice control the navigation and search within any device that functions off an operating system. If that happens, what will the impact be on search advertising? We could feasibly be entering into a stage of search where audio ads make a stand. Imagine a future with voice-activated search when an advertiser can insert spoken word messaging into the interaction between Siri and the consumer. The same goes for any of the voice-operated interaction systems in your car. From Audi to Ford (who is partnered with Microsoft), most manufacturers have some kind of voice-activated solution, and every mobile device is coming equipped with one as well. When you ask your device to search for a route through navigation and the temperature is over 90 degrees, why can’t the device suggest a place for some lemonade or an iced coffee? Traditional search results will still have paid ads inserted into them, but for voice-activated search, why can’t we expect a future with short 5-second voice activated ads? Search is not a forgone conclusion, unless we treat it as such. The area of search is still ripe for innovation and Google can’t do it all. If I were a budding entrepreneur, search is still an area where I might pay some attention, but I would start my “search” on devices that are decidedly non-PC related. Mobile and connected devices such as cars are an interesting place, as is the interface with my set-top box. It’s not dissimilar to inserting ads in radio, or spoken word recommendations. The “native advertising” model seems to be gaining steam these days and maybe the future of search is tied directly into it? To answer my own question, “what happened to search”? Nothing happened as of late, and that creates an opportunity. Search is ripe for innovation, and whether it comes from Google or somewhere else remains to be seen. What are you seeing in this all-important area of the web?
Los Angeles-based Internet marketing firm ITC Monday announced that they have become a Google certified partner. ITC specializes in SEO operations, and have “climbed to the top 1% of the SEO industry and [can now claim] the right to display the badge of Google certification.” “Being a certified partner with Google allows our firm to stay on top of the latest features, functions and resources,” stated Brad Frank, ITC's senior account executive. With the partnership, ITC gains access to marketing support from Google, exclusive Google partner events, and the instant credibility among users that comes by being Google certified.