Marchex Unveils Local Search Offering By David Needle
February 13, 2009
Imagine you need to find a sport medicine doctor, legal services, a muffler specialist or some other resource in your community. Those old enough to remember the ad slogan "Let your fingers do the walking" may still use the big Yellow Pages book to find such services.
But in the age of Google, why bother? The search giant and its competition can help you find those services online. But upstart Marchex thinks it has a more efficient and focused "local-centric" solution than the big search engines provide.
The company specializes in a broad array of local commerce search services that are more specifically targeted to local markets and niches.
Marchex said it attracts more than 33 million people a month to its network of search services, which includes its OpenList.com and Yellow.com Web sites. OpenList is an aggregator of local businesses and services as well as reviews and ratings; Yellow.com is a centralized resource of local yellow and white page listings. Advertisers have jumped in, too. Marchex said it has more than 80,000 national and local advertisers.
"Our goal is to match up advertisers and SMBs with customers," Leigh McMillan, senior vice president of marketing and communications at Marchex, told InternetNews.com. For SMBs (Small-to-Medium-sized Businesses), that reach now extends to mobile as more consumers look to the mobile devices in their pockets for information such as where to find local businesses.
"The advent of the iPhone, mobile is increasingly becoming a key source for local business information," said McMillan.
The mobile push is an extension of the company's Business Profile Pages. The Profile Pages give advertisers performance data to measure marketing results and return-on-investment, including click-throughs on the page, and the number of calls generated and forms submitted.
Announced last week, Marchex said the Business Profile Pages for mobile are available for the iPhone, BlackBerry, and other smart phones.
Analyst Greg Sterling, principal of Sterling Market Intelligence, said big profits from mobile advertising may be years away, but Marchex is smart to be getting in the game now. "It won't go to their bottom line right away, but it's strategic. Companies that can straddle both the Internet and mobile are going to be in better shape in the long run," Sterling told InternetNews.com.
"The iPhone has kind of crystallized the market for everyone, so Android and Blackberry are moving in the same direction," Sterling added.
Rather than ignore Google, Marchex actually works in conjunction with the search giant's ad network. Last month it became the first, and for now only, Google "AdWords authorized reseller technology platform."
Among the requirements Marchex met is being able to provide a platform that is compliant with Google's API (define) and provide comprehensive reporting that includes impressions, click through rates and other metrics.
Ed O'Keefe, vice president of product development at Marchex, said its work with Google is key. "With our platform, we control the knobs of what works to deliver a high performance solution," told InternetNews.com. "With Google we're able to choose and diversify and be nimble about how we use that ad inventory."
McMillan said Marchex is happy to work with Google and any other current or potential competitors. "We think of ourselves as like Switzerland, we're neutral. We want to get our advertisers on whatever the best distribution is for them, whether that's ours or our competitors. We work and play well together."
This article by David Needle appears courtesy of InternetNews.com
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