Google has started a limited rollout of a new fixed price SMB ad type in the San Diego and San Francisco market. The ad, which a new type of ad, which will be highlighted with a pushpin both on the ad and on the 10 Pack Map will be located directly above the 10 Pack view.
This new ad type will be accessible via a new tab in the Local Business Center and will offer call tracking and reporting. Greg Sterling has reported on this at both SearchEnginland and Screenwerks where he noted that it didn’t appear that this ad type would be available through resellers. That may well be true but many LBC accounts are managed for the SMB’s by their search companies. I think that the simplicity and guaranteed placement of this ad type will be appealing.
The ads will be automatically created by Google and can currently be directed to either the business’s home page or their Places page. It is not clear to me that SMB’s will be all that cracked up about sending their ad to a page that could very well contain competitor’s ads and paying for that privelege.
Greg noted that although pricing has not been firmly established that he speculated it would run between $20 and $200/mo depending on the category and market. Pricing is always an issue for small businesses but given thGoogle’s low operating expenses, pricing could be enticing. For many SMB’s this could very well be their first experience with call tracking and true ad accountability. It will be interesting to see how they value that extra accountability.
In my survey’s of the top 200 listings in Google Maps across multiple categories, LBC adoption ranged from a low of 5% to a high of roughly 25%. While this program would be significantly more successful with active marketing, it offers of the possibility of significant incremental revenue to Google with no additional efforts of their part. It will be interesting to see how pricing compares to the bid based pricing in Adwords and whether the two values are tied together.
We are announcing, for immediate delivery, the availability of this year’s 2009 Limited* Edition SMX East Local T-Shirt!
The shirt is intended to commenorate David Mihm’s Ultimate Local SEO Vanity Search & raise money for charity. All profits will be donated to Google to hire a customer support representative.
This shirt, available in a limited quantity is tastefully designed with David Mihm’s photo on the upper right crest and captioned:
Buy now as the supply is limited!
On the back of this classic T, done in a tasteful white with a touch of familiar color, we offer David’s tactful & classic answer to this important question: (more…)
Over the past 48 hours, both personally and in the forums I have seen a large number of inquiries as to why rankings had dropped, why reviews had disappeared, why citations had gone missing, why the LBC had stopped showing stats and impressions had dropped to zero in Google Maps.
This comment posted on a recent post here is typical of these many inquiries: “she disappeared completely as of today, dropping to 21 for interior design”.
Even though I know better, even though I realize that Maps is a work in progress, has a few quirks and is undergoing a major renovation with the implementation of the all new Places pages, alarms still went off for me when I saw stats on several accounts drop to zero:
As I told several folks yesterday, despite a nagging voice in my head that God Google was somehow punishing me, it was probably just a temporary aberration as Google makes the transition to Places. In the meantime, I said, don’t neglect all of your non-Google on-line marketing that you have in place. Its a good time to send out a newsletter, refine your Barnacle SEO, optimize your website for long tail local searches, contact your email list, update your blog and post to Twitter.
Well late yesterday, things started returning to normal on some listings. Reviews were returning, web references were starting to show up and listings were once again popping into the 10-Pack. It does appear that it was/is a temporary phenomena. My working theory is that Google temporarily rolled back to an older data set as part of the Places upgrade. I think the issue will persist across a range of listings until whatever internal changes Google is making are firmly in place.
Google has wanted small businesses to pay attention to Maps. I am not sure that this Pavlovian response was what they had in mind.
To the many small businesses I say, use this as a wake up call that while Google Maps is an important component of your on-line strategy, it should not be the only component. If you have yet to develop those alternative marketing tactics then, rather than developing a Maps religion, become more agnostic and do it now. Religion in this context does not serve you well.
