Today Marchex launched an analytics tool to better capture what it quantifies as a $4 billion opportunity for call-based mobile advertising. Call Analytics for Search is the newest addition to its mobile ad measurement product suite, and it targets enterprise-level advertisers.

The feature set (from today’s press release) includes:

— 100% keyword attribution from all phone calls driven from mobile search.
— Real-time conversion data using Marchex Call DNA technology to identify those calls that are most likely to convert into sales.
— Automated setup and synchronization with leading bid-management platforms, such as DoubleClick, Kenshoo and Marin, which allows search marketers to measure and improve campaigns accurately in real time.

This all comes back to the growth in consumer-initiated phone calls from mobile search.  BIA/Kelsey’s forecasts phone calls  from mobile search to reach 72 billion annually by 2018 — largely driven by smartphone penetration and evolving mobile user behavior.

“Click-to-call ads from search results has become a massive driver of incoming phone calls from mobile consumers to local and national businesses,” John Busby, Marchex SVP of Consumer Insights told us.

But there’s still a gap for tracking the source and quality of most of these calls. By applying technology to fix that blind spot, the idea is to give phone leads better attribution metrics.  And as call volume continues to increase, marketers will be more compelled to rely analytics to make sense of it all.

“In conservatively looking at our own data and the broader industry, we came to the surprising realization that while there’s now $4 billion being spent by marketers on click-to-call, there was not a solution for full measurement and attribution,” said Busby.

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BIA/Kelsey analyst Mike Boland, who co-wrote this post, will be a guest speaker on a webinar with Marchex at 1PM EST today.

The post Marchex Brings More Clarity to a $4 Billion Click-to-Call Market appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Mobile usage growth correlates to call volume to local businesses, which underpins the call growing call monetization opportunity. Several companies are working with this opportunity by building call analytics platforms, a key piece of the puzzle.

Invoca is one of those companies. The company, which says it has grown its revenue 12X since 2012, has pushed the ball forward with a new application, Invoca for Salesforce. The app allows marketers to manage inbound calls via their mobile devices.

“While technology like marketing automation, bid management and web analytics allow marketers to track the online customer path to purchase, as soon as someone picks up the phone, the chain is broken,” Invoca President Eric Holmen told us. “Marketers are left flat-footed when it comes to driving their highest converting leads.” The new application “works towards fixing this blind spot.”

The opportunity is underscored by BIA/Kelsey data, which projects phone leads driven by mobile search to reach 72 billion annually by 2018. Our Local Commerce Monitor (LCM) survey of SMBs meanwhile pegs phone calls as the most valuable form of customer lead.

As the volume of call-based leads to businesses continue to grow and be highly valued by local businesses, we expect that players in the space will continue to refine products to meet the demand. This growth and competition will be a driving force of the call monetization opportunity we’re covering closely.

The post Invoca: Call Analytics Fix the 'Blind Spot' in Digital Marketing appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Mobile usage growth correlates to call volume to local businesses, which underpins the call growing call monetization opportunity. Several companies are working with this opportunity by building call analytics platforms, a key piece of the puzzle.

Invoca is one of those companies. The company, which says it has grown its revenue 12X since 2012, has pushed the ball forward with a new application, Invoca for Salesforce. The app allows marketers to manage inbound calls via their mobile devices.

“While technology like marketing automation, bid management and web analytics allow marketers to track the online customer path to purchase, as soon as someone picks up the phone, the chain is broken,” Invoca President Eric Holmen told us. “Marketers are left flat-footed when it comes to driving their highest converting leads.” The new application “works towards fixing this blind spot.”

The opportunity is underscored by BIA/Kelsey data, which projects phone leads driven by mobile search to reach 72 billion annually by 2018. Our Local Commerce Monitor (LCM) survey of SMBs meanwhile pegs phone calls as the most valuable form of customer lead.

As the volume of call-based leads to businesses continue to grow and be highly valued by local businesses, we expect that players in the space will continue to refine products to meet the demand. This growth and competition will be a driving force of the call monetization opportunity we’re covering closely.

The post Invoca: Call Analytics Fix the ‘Blind Spot’ in Digital Marketing appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

On Monday, BuildZoom announced it has raised $2.2 million. With the latest round of infusion, we asked the Co-Founder, Jiyan Wei, where the company is headed next.

“Our goal is to bring transparency to consumers who are shopping for a home improvement contractors. There is a knowledge gap that exists in hiring contractors. We want to bring transparency to pricing and duration of the project — we have the data.”

The Buildzoom platform is designed to help consumers look for home improvement contract work by matching them with the best-fitting professionals for the job. Buildzoom takes a far different approach than just relying on relying on customer reviews and other info. Buildzoom applies a Big Data method and analyzes more than 50 million construction permits, 3 million contractor profiles, and other third party data sources. The company’s Big Data approach is based on assorted information from state licensing boards and Better Business Bureaus; crowd sourcing via social media sites; insurance and bonding status; and self-provided information. A five star rating is just one piece of the puzzle — mitigating the risk of infrequent ratings.

“What distinguishes us from an Angie’s list is our unique focus on the regulated marketplace,” Jiyan Wei said. Buildzoom has created a two-sided marketplace — one for customers to get recommendations on contractors and the other for home improvement service providers to be listed for prospective projects.

The company will use its funds for hiring and growth. BuildZoom was founded in 2012 by Jiyan Wei and David Petersen and is based in San Francisco. The company previously raised a first seed round of $1.4 million.

The post Big Data for Big Renovations: A Conversation with BuildZoom appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Facebook today announced the relaunch of Atlas, an ad network that connects online campaigns to offline purchases across multiple devices. Atlas isn’t a new company but instead has been rebuilt since been being acquired from Microsoft last year. This announcement follow’s Facebook’s announcement of an ambitious program to match sales related data from a variety of sources to show ROI at BIA/Kelsey’s Leading in Local: SMB Digital Marketing event in New Orleans.

The platform will utilize Facebook data to track users between devices and connect online campaigns to offline results. This is an effort Facebook has been working on with its Custom Audience Tool. A Datalogix study showed that 89 percent of people who saw a Facebook ad and then bought a product in the store did not click on the ad. This uncovers an important behavioral trend for local advertisers who are increasingly critical of ROAS (return on ad spend).

Atlas doesn’t only link consumers to their Facebook accounts but with their interactions on other websites and apps.  Facebook is already equipped with a deep social data trove with 1.32 billion MAUs. This positions it to launch Atlas across both desktop and mobile and to compete more closely with Google’s Ad Sense network. Along with the Atlas’ relaunch, Facebook announced Ommicon has signed on as the first major agency partner.

The post Facebook Launches Atlas: A People-Based Ad Network appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

YP, a local search platform for more than 80 million people across the U.S., announced that participating GrubHub restaurant listings will be integrated across YP’s flagship consumer brands, including YP.com and the YP mobile app. The integration will allow YP users to view menus and place orders directly on information pages for restaurants.

Consumers will now find a more seamless transaction within the YP environment when conducting local searches, finding menu items and ordering food from GrubHub listings. The goal for YP is to have more traffic to its owned and operated properties and to have a stake in point of sale transactions.

GrubHub Inc. is an online and mobile food-ordering company that connects users with local takeout restaurants.

This partnerships with GrubHub comes after YP announced it generated nearly 400 million in mobile advertising revenue in 2013. YP is continuing to strengthen their mobile offerings to attract consumers who are more mobile than ever before.

YP has a clear focus on evolving the consumer experience from a local search perspective.

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Today at BIA/Kelsey’s SMB Digital Marketing conference, Agendize announced a smart watch app for managing appointments on the go. The new online scheduling software brings scheduling and CRM capability to the wrist — particularly fitting (excuse the pun) for service SMBs out in the field.

“Scheduling is a productivity application accessible from anywhere,” Agendize sales & marketing head Davy Bour told us, “so professionals can spend more time doing what they love and what ultimately grows their business: spending time with their customers. The Smartwatch app brings this connectivity, productivity and mobility to a brand new device.”

Look out for a longer conversation and video interview with the Agendize team next week to delve further into implications for watch appointments/alerts.

The post At Leading In Local: Agendize Unveils Smartwatch Scheduling App appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

As we gear up for our LEADING IN LOCAL: SMB Digital Marketing conference, there’s a lot to look forward to. Local Market Launch, a startup that helps companies manage the online presence of local stores, just announced a suite of channel partner solutions that the company claims will make it easier for partners to deliver business listings management services to their SMB clients. Local Market Launch is set to exhibit its full suite of business listings management solutions for SMB channel partners for the first time at our conference next week.

These enhancements are being released at a time where Local Market Launch has been gaining traction with the market — 1000 percent growth in the number of locations being managed. As a result, their staff has nearly doubled.

Bryan Coryat, founder and CEO of Local Market Launch, had this to say in their press release:

“We have always had a parallel focus on delivering a solution that helps SMBs get found everywhere their customers are searching, while also making it easy for our channel partners to manage their clients’ business listings across all relevant digital channels. The enhanced services we are rolling out address both of these goals. They also offer our channel partners the flexibility to creatively integrate these new solutions within their unique SMB platforms.”

In addition to Local Market Launch’s product exhibition, 50 plus industry leaders will grace the stage at LEADING IN LOCAL: SMB Digital Marketing Sept. 22-24 in New Orleans. We’re looking forward to a great show. Don’t miss out on all the excitement in local media.

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Last week, call tracking and analytics provider Ifbyphone announced not one, but two major milestones. First, the company announced that it has raised $30 million in series E funding — bringing its total funding to $60 million. It also announced the acquisition of call tracking provider Mongoose Metrics.

With the infusion and acquisition, we asked the company where it’s headed next.

“We will focus on what we have always done: developing the most innovative products, providing the best customer experience in the industry, and expanding our organization to support our growing list of clients,” said Steve Griffiths, Vice President of Marketing and Product Strategy at Ifbyphone. “With the Mongoose Metrics’ team at our side, we are well positioned to do so.”

The Ifbyphone platform is designed to help businesses drive, track, analyze and route phone calls to the most appropriate sales rep to convert them into revenue. The company has been providing call-based marketing technology solutions for SMBs and the agencies that serve them since its launch in 2005.

The post New Funding and Acquisition: A Conversation with Ifbyphone appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

According to our newly released LCM wave 18 data, SMBs find that call-based leads tend to be of higher quality than email (where SMBs reported 43% to be good/excellent), Facebook (35.3% good/excellent) and even in store visits (58.8% good/excellent). Between those SMBs that found call-based leads to be of “good quality” (33.2%) or “excellent quality” (35.5%) that’s an astonishing 68.6 percent. What does this mean? Increasingly, phone calls are becoming the bread and butter lead-type for the vast majority of small businesses.

This has led to a lot of interesting and complex challenges for marketers that service SMB campaigns – with the most pressing issue being how to attribute offline calls that came from online campaigns back to the campaigns themselves. Dynamic call-tracking numbers have been able to solve this problem partially, but still don’t provide the depth of analytics that are necessary to create the highest return on investment for marketing campaigns.

This is where companies like Invoca come in. Until recently, SMBs have had a difficult time tracking the digital path a consumer took that led to them placing a phone call. Essentially, once a person calls into a business from an online campaign, they would switch from online to offline and would appear “new” to the business. Existing marketing automation, retargeting, and CRM software platforms often go blind once this transition takes place.

Invoca and other call analytics platforms have developed solutions to bridge the online-offline call intelligence gap, and have been able to equip marketers with the necessary data and insight needed to maximize marketing campaign ROI. We recently sat with the Invoca product team to learn about Signal, their new phone call analytics solution designed to assist businesses with connecting keywords and campaigns to phone calls – layered with contextual data that aids in analyzing the content of the call in real-time.

A key element of the tool is dynamic session-based tracking. In the event a number changes from one campaign to the next, the customer will still be remembered and identified from the last time they clicked through and called. Once the call occurs, the software creates or links to an existing profile, attributes information related to the call, then allows for data dips into third party solutions, then finally routes them to another sales department based on a lead scoring and routing automated metric system.

Signal takes the context of the call a step further with sentiment analysis after the call has been connected and a conversation has begun. Pairing these two types of data while connecting it with keywords from the online campaign provides SMBs with interesting call attribution capabilities.

Call-based leads will continue to be the gold-standard lead-type for SMBs as mobile devices and mobile search continue to boom. We expect the interest/demand for call intelligence and analytics solutions like Invoca’s Signal product to grow as marketers continue ride the mobile-call wave.

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