Google Places search was released on October 27 with a great deal of fanfare and commentary. It has been available for over a month and the Places Dashboard analytics data can now provide some insight into the impact of the new display.
I have assembled an overview of the impressions and actions based of the Dashboard analytics for 45 listings for the 4 weeks prior to the rollout and the 4 weeks after the rollout.
I recognize that these numbers are, by design, superficial and are on occasion buggy (showing fewer impressions than actions). We also don’t know if the analytics kept up with the main search results page. However in aggregate, they do provide some general insights about the switch. The business listings represent a range of industries, locales and business size so the sample should represent a reasonable cross section of reality.
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Rasmus Himmelstrup, of SeoAnalyst, and Sebastian Socha, of KennstDueinen.de, are both reporting from Europe a new Places Search Everything result that is showing only four search results on a page. In Sebastian’s screenshot all four of those results were blended results while in Rasmus’s 3 of the 4 were blended results
I had to look at the screen shot twice before I realized that it was NOT a cropped image:
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Daniel Tunkelang has announced on his blog today that he is leaving his position at Google Maps for an exciting research position at LinkedIn. Daniel was hired at Google about a year ago. There he worked on authority pages and the of mapping businesses to their official home pages.
When Daniel was first hired at Google as an engineer he did something that was amazing and delightful. He reached out to me, looking to understand issues and concerns that I had with Google Maps and their approach to Local. We initially had several detailed email exchanges and a long telephone call. He was gracious, inquisitive and forthright. All things that I respect and honor. He reached across a chasm that typically exists between Google and me and was sincere in his efforts to understand my critiques. Google could learn much from his outreach efforts (although as he pointed out personal contact doesn’t scale well 
).
We have stayed in touch, off and on throughout the year and I have appreciated the occasional communications and (personal) assistance that he has provided. Even though I don’t know him in a truly personal sense, I consider him a friend and wish him well at LinkedIn.
It appears that Google is willing to fill the results page with local Places Search results if they are in fact the most relevant results on a given search.
Mike Ramsey, our intrepid Idaho local marketer, alerted me to the occurence of 9 local results showing on the search: Boston Personal Injury Lawyer. I ran the search against Safari Mac, Firefox Mac, IE 8, Chrome PC and all are showing 9 local search results.
All of the results had reasonably optimized websites and claimed Places pages. The fact that the results are showing in Idaho and NY and are visible across major browsers on different platforms indicates that this is unlikely to be a test. It seems clear that Google is now not arbitrarily limiting local results to a specific number on the page if there are relevant blended Places results for the query. For the Boston lawyer search, a directory site was not visible in the first two pages of results with Superpages and Avvo respectively showing results at positions 5 and 6 on page 3.
As recently as the end of October, Andrew Shotland was seeing strong IYP traffic on sites he was monitoring and wrote the post Maybe Local Directories Aren’t Dead After All?. He noted that “rumors of the Yellow Pages death have been greatly exaggerated”.
Clearly, there are opportunities still for IYPs but they also seem to be becoming smaller as time moves on.
Here is a screen shot…. (more…)
Mike Ramsey from NiftyMarketing, a Boise Local Search Consultant, and frequent commenter Plamen have both spotted this new Google search results test with 10 Places results in the Everything Serps. Now the anti-IYP conspiracy theorists have something real to point to .
David Mihm has an excellent piece (that I happen to agree with) on why Groupon in a broad sense is synergistic for Google. I think coupons and the new twist that Groupon brings to them will be a successful and profitable advertising medium. John Battelle thinks it worth significantly more than $2.5 billion. Greg Sterling though argues that it isn’t worth $5 billion and that very well could be true. But Google may be the only company for which the purchase makes sense at these levels.
I would like to add the following thoughts to the discussion. Greg has estimated to me that only 25% of all SMBs will ever be willing to participate in self serve internet advertising. The leaves the vast majority of local businesses not participating in and unaffected by most of what Google offers (Tags, Boost, Adwords) today.
I have estimated that Boost with a 10% adoption rate and an average $100/mo spend would generate $500 million a year in income. If it approached the 25% cap it would reach $1.2 billion with current adoption levels of 2 million claimed businesses. I have estimated that Tags, at a fixed spend of $25/mo and the same 10% has a much more limited short term potential of $60 million. Even as claimed listings grow, there is a very real top side expectation for both products in a self serve world.
Enter Groupon. It is a product that is already generating $500,000,000 in annual income. If Google did nothing else but add the revenue stream to Tags and Boost when it rolls out nationally, they would be at a $1 billion dollar in local ad revenue.
But Groupon also has staff on the ground trained in selling new media. The portfolio for these sales people would immediately increase with a buyout. And an impressive portfolio it would be. These folks could lead with a Groupon deal and then lock in a monthly recurring revenue source with Boost or Adwords. If their selling efforts for Groupon were a bust initially, they could still start folks with Tags and demonstrate the significant benefits of local internet advertising and of claiming their listing in Places and move on to Boost and Groupon down the road.
This purchase would not just give Google a successful, easy to explain coupon product for SMBs (and national players to add to the Adwords revenue stream) but it would give them an on the ground sales force with an actual foot in the door of the other 75% of businesses that would never self serve. It is conceivable to me that just by adding these products to the portfolio and pitching them in person Tags and Boost sales would skyrocket immediately.
Google would have in place Free (Places, Offers), Good (Tags, Tagged Offers), Better (Boost, *?) and Best (Adwords, Groupon) product offerings in both a self serve and full service model that could scale from the single shop to the national retail chain, nationally and internationally. It would cover 100% of the opportunity, have huge upside potential and start out of the gate with a roughly $1 billion highly profitable, income stream and a defensible position …
Investors may not like the economics and analyzed singly Groupon might not in fact make sense. But if Google could use the purchase to jumpstart and grow Boost, Tags and Adwords for local in the rest of the world, the potential of Groupon to them at least, is big.
Here is a chart of Google’s free and paid products for Local that shows how Groupon would fit in the mix…
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Google Places search was released on October 27 with a great deal of fanfare and commentary. It has been available for over a month and the Places Dashboard analytics data can now provide some insight into the impact of the new display.
