UBL will provide stock and cash in consideration of the merger. While both companies initially keep their own identities, they intend to work towards an integration of operations and a single brand. Both companies earned approximately $8 million apiece in 2014. Charlotte-based UBL has 38 employees while Advice Interactive has 85 employees in Dallas and Newport Beach.

Billed as a “combination of equals,” UBL CEO Doyal Bryant will be the new entity’s CEO, while Advice CEO Bernadette Coleman will run marketing, tech and operations. Bryant notes that the deal allows UBL to focus on a growing global market in syndicated business profiles; an area that has gone beyond search engines to also include mobile apps, GPS search and online maps, video platforms, marketing platforms and social networks. UBL currently has operations in Canada, the UK, Australia and New Zealand and says it will soon add four more countries.

Advice, meanwhile, is set to leverage UBL’s listings/video and mobile-rich database, and provide a one stop for a wide range of activities for its business and enterprise customers. These include local search, PPC & SEM, reputation management, SEO, Web design, content marketing and social media. The majority of Advice’s customers come from local channel partners; its strength and technology platform are expected to enhance UBL’s current efforts in the space, which are not a main emphasis.

The merger gives Advice “a major edge over everyone in the (SEO) space,” says Coleman. As marketing moves to hyperlocal capabilities, it isn’t just about search anymore, she emphasizes. “Clients need to have data syndication; optimized profiles; and customized linking and meta data — all in one place.”

Advice Interactive Group CEO Bernadette Coleman is speaking at BIA/Kelsey NATIONAL, which takes place March 25-27 in Dallas.

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UBL will provide stock and cash in consideration of the merger. While both companies initially keep their own identities, they intend to work towards an integration of operations and a single brand. Both companies earned approximately $8 million apiece in 2014. Charlotte-based UBL has 38 employees while Advice Interactive has 85 employees in Dallas and Newport Beach.

Billed as a “combination of equals,” UBL CEO Doyal Bryant will be the new entity’s CEO, while Advice CEO Bernadette Coleman will run marketing, tech and operations. Bryant notes that the deal allows UBL to focus on a growing global market in syndicated business profiles; an area that has gone beyond search engines to also include mobile apps, GPS search and online maps, video platforms, marketing platforms and social networks. UBL currently has operations in Canada, the UK, Australia and New Zealand and says it will soon add four more countries.

Advice, meanwhile, is set to leverage UBL’s listings/video and mobile-rich database, and provide a one stop for a wide range of activities for its business and enterprise customers. These include local search, PPC & SEM, reputation management, SEO, Web design, content marketing and social media. The majority of Advice’s customers come from local channel partners; its strength and technology platform are expected to enhance UBL’s current efforts in the space, which are not a main emphasis.

The merger gives Advice “a major edge over everyone in the (SEO) space,” says Coleman. As marketing moves to hyperlocal capabilities, it isn’t just about search anymore, she emphasizes. “Clients need to have data syndication; optimized profiles; and customized linking and meta data — all in one place.”

Advice Interactive Group CEO Bernadette Coleman is speaking at BIA/Kelsey NATIONAL, which takes place March 25-27 in Dallas.

The post UBL, Advice Interactive Group Will Merge; SEO + Syndicated Listings appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Mobile devices are becoming vital to Canadian consumers when they are searching for local businesses. Brick and mortar foot traffic is increased as a result with 65% of consumers who search on mobile devices going directly to a brick and mortar locations to complete their purchases. Maps are also a key factor for mobile search with 85% of smartphone users finding local map inclusion in search results at least somewhat important. When consumers actually perform a search, 94% of searchers prefer to use mobile browsers over mobile apps.

Social media is key for reviews and recommendations of products and local businesses. Eighty-six percent of respondents reported that ratings and reviews were an important factor for them when making a purchase decision. Consumers not only like to see what other people have to say about products they have used or businesses they have visited, but they also like to provide their own reviews. Thirty-seven percent of respondents said that they were likely to post about a purchase they have made to their social media network.

Here are some other key findings from the Annual Kantar Consumer Search Behavior Study:

— Consumers continue to show greater confidence in “organic search” results over pay for click

— Consumers prefer mobile browsing compatibility over mobile app availability (by a factor of 9)

— 60% of Canadians search for local business information at least once a week (27% at least a few times a week)

— 48% are conducting searches directly through search engines like Bing, Yahoo and FireFox or Google (opposed to searches within company websites or directory listings)

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The local search market will expand from $6.0 billion to $8.6 billion during this five-year period, accelerating at a faster pace than the aggregate U.S. search market. Mobile-local search is a critical growth driver as users leverage their devices to make local decisions, and geo-targeted messages surface against these queries. Desktop search volume continues to rise as well, though, largely a product of rising tablet adoption and surging vertical search on specialized, category-specific sites (auto, jobs, etc.).

Local display, which includes social media advertising, remains smaller than search. However, the sector is growing more quickly, from $2.9 billion to $5.7 billion during the five-year curve. The primary growth drivers are social and video display, both of which are seeing expanded inventory and improving CPM rates.

BIA/Kelsey clients can log in to download the full report.

The post Local Online/Interactive Advertising Revenues to Approach $18 Billion by 2017 appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Here’s what we’ve been waiting to announce: Google Offers’ head Nitin Mangtani will join our great list of keynoters at ILM East March 26-28 in Boston. We believe Mangtani’s appearance marks one of the first public debuts of Google Offers, which is playing a major role in Google’s vital local strategy, along with Google Places, Google Maps and Zagat ratings and reviews.

Previously announced ILM East keynoters include Groupon Vice Chair +++ Ted Leonsis; American Express SVP of Social Media Leslie Berland; CityGrid Media CEO Jay Herratti; New York Times Research Ops VP Michael Zimbalist; and New York Magazine Digital GM Michael Silberman.

Mangtani joins Google Channel Sales BizDev Head Christine Merritt at ILM East. Merritt will provide Google’s perspective on its emergence in the local ecosystem, and the most effective way to work with Google as a partner.

The next wave of Deals is, in general, a key focus for us at ILM East, along with mobile local media, social local media, video local media, hyperlocal and locally targeted national advertising.

In addition to the keynotes from Google Offers and Groupon, we have a special Day 1 session dedicated to the next wave of deals, featuring EverSave’s Jere Doyle; Find n Save’s Christopher Tippie; Closely’s Perry Evans; and Boomtime’s Bill Bice. That session will be followed by a broader view of deals and ecommerce, which featured NextJump’s Charlie Kim; Cartera’s Jim Douglass; and Bundle.com’s Jaidev Shergill.

Other recent adds to the program include The Boston Globe’s Lisa DeSisto, who joins Boston.com VP of Digital Products Jeff Moriarty as a presenter; and MIT Sloan Associate Professor Catherine Tucker, who gives the low down on the effectiveness of local social media.

Before the show, we’re making a special trip to The Boston Globe’s R&D Lab (Limited Space, RSVP required). Or come to Andrew Shotland’s SEO for the Enterprise session, which also features SEO Expert Will Scott and Advance Digital Media VP John Denny. We’re looking forward to a great show.

Venture Capital
•David Hornik, Principal, August Capital
•Scott Maxwell, Senior Managing Director, OpenView

Mobile Local Media
• Walt Doyle, CEO, Where
• Doug McDonald, Director, dotMobi
• John Valentine, VP, East Coast, SCVNGR/LevelUp

Hyperlocal
• Merrill Brown, Principal, MMB Media
• Josh Fenton, CEO, GoLocal24
• Zohar Yardeni, CEO, Main Street Connect

Social Local Media
• Geoff Cramer, CEO, Social Made Simple
• Adam Japko, President, Digital Sherpa
• Jeff Moriarty, VP, Digital Products, Boston.com
• Mark Schmulen, GM, Social Media, Constant Contact

Video
• Juan Delgado, Managing Director, Americas, Perform
• John McIntyre, CEO, Pixelfish
• Randa Minkarah, SVP, Revenue, Fisher Communications

Deals and Promotional Ecosystem
• Bill Bice, CEO, BoomTime
• Jere Doyle, President and CEO, EverSave
• Perry Evans, CEO, Closely
• Christopher Tippie, CEO, FindNSave

Transactions
• Charlie Kim, CEO, NextJump
• Jim Douglass, EVP, Retail Advertising, Cartera Commerce
• Jaidev Shergill, CEO, Bundle

National/Brands
•Adam Epstein, President, AdMarketplace
•Pete Gombert,CEO, Balihoo
• Steve Sherfy, Local & Mobile Search, GroupMSearch
• Karl Siebrecht, President and CEO, AdReady

Elections 2012
• Andy Slater, VP, Digital Agency Sales, Katz 360

SMB Marketing
• Dave Galvan, President, Schedulicity
• Maria Kermath, Director, AT&T Ad Solutions
• Randy Parker, President, SMBApps
• Darren Waddell, EVP, Reply.com

Sign up now (and hint: reserve your room earlier rather than later).

The post Google Offers’ Nitin Mangtani Set to Keynote at ILM East appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

According to additional data from Compete and Google, we’ll continue to see B2B companies duke it out in paid search. Their report cites 73 percent of U.S. B2B execs used an online search engine last June to conduct purchase research.

In addition, the study also revealed more reliance on video. Google and Compete polled more than 1,600 U.S. execs and tracked the online activity of U.S. Web users both to and from selected B2B websites. Between February 2010 and March 2011, B2B-branded YouTube searches doubled.

Recently, Yelp posted a video on its business blog of SMB advertising success stories. Time will tell if we’ll see more brands using video content to share product-specific information, demos and testimonials.

The post Minding Their Business: B2B Execs Prefer Paid Search and Video appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

SMB reseller WebVisible went through difficult changes last year, downsizing from 320 to 130 employees and retreating from an ambitious direct marketing program. But it has kept core partners intact; key members of the CEO’s installed executive team have stayed intact; and the company has aggressively ramped up its technology program. It is now poised for sustainability and growth, according to CEO Ron Burr, who took over from co-founder Kirsten Mangers last September.

“We made some expensive mistakes on the direct business,” says Burr, former head of NetZero, who joined WebVisible last year. “We took our eye off the ball on our partner business. But now we are refocusing on our channel partners.” In addition to keeping key accounts such as McClatchy and BT, WebVisible recently won the account for Recruit, a $10 billion Japanese company with 12 media properties.

Burr notes that all through the strife, the company has maintained revenues of roughly $25 million. Roughly 70 percent of revenues were U.S. based, and 30 percent were international. This year, the ratio should be 60 percent U.S., and 40 percent international. There should also be 10 percent revenue growth in 2011.

The growth is partially attributable to the rollout of a more efficient, cloud-based tech platform, and new technology that allows the company to “understand the effectiveness of particular keyword structures in a campaign, and how they concert to action by consumers, whether phone calls or clicks. The tech results in a 30 percent increase in effectiveness,” says Burr. WebVisible is also focused on providing customers a centralized database for local advertising, whether it is tracking Groupon, clicks or e-mail marketing. “It all needs to co-exist,” says Burr.

“The interesting thing about the pure plays in this space … ReachLocal, Yodle and WebVisible … is that nobody’s made it to profitability,” adds Burr. “That’s the tack we are taking now. Run this company profitably with a viable business strategy.”

The post WebVisible CEO Ron Burr: Focus Is on Sustainability and Growth appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Online “ad versioning” has taken on heightened significance as national and regional brands vie for their own piece of the sizable local advertising pie. However, as SEM becomes more sophisticated and consumers expect smart targeting from commercial messages, basic metro-level campaigns often don’t suffice. Kenshoo realizes that and is implementing its Conversion Attribution Modeling platform with national clients to allow them to effectively build out hundreds of search campaigns targeted to specific store locations.

Kenshoo’s director of product marketing, Ariel Rosenstein, told BIA/Kelsey that for retailers and other businesses with diverse geographical locations, consumers are in different “life cycle” stages (awareness, consideration, intent, purchase), meaning that keywords resonate differently based on a buyer’s position in the purchase funnel. If these distinctions are not accounted for, then the unwanted result can be the misallocation of online budgets to keywords that are not optimizing. Generally, this plays out with a business overvaluing the last click prior to purchase while discounting other keywords that may have been essential in driving the ultimate conversion.

Kenshoo’s Real Time Tracking mechanism gives large-scale businesses running multiple, simultaneous campaigns a location-specific window into where clicks are originating from and where they’re leading. Based on how this behavioral pattern points to conversion, combined with the goals of the client, a national-local franchise can apply weight attributions to decipher which keywords are most effective in driving purchases. Campaigns can then be modified to accentuate powerful keywords and redirect away from less effective ones.

For instance, if a business is courting initial customers, it may choose to place additional weight on early clicks that introduce potential buyers to a brand. Meanwhile, time-sensitive campaigns can invoke time decay attribution so that more recent clicks receive more value.

Image Credit: Kenshoo

Rosenstein showcased Kenshoo client Extra Space Storage as an example of the importance of attribution weighting to understanding the unique, and often segmented, behavioral and buying patterns of a customer base. Notably, nearly 25 percent of ESS’ conversions included “some geographic term, yet they were running general campaigns. They needed to add local keywords.” Additionally, almost one-third of conversions had “a brand keyword in the path,” making it important to shift away from “prefer last” keyword attribution to more balanced models that accounted for the importance of brand awareness. And in some geographic areas, conversions occur more quickly than in others.

The next game changer for national-local brands is social media, which plays a dynamic role in the customer life cycle and has heavy cross-over with search. Kenshoo is already using Facebook’s API to attribute conversions from social channels. Its next, more ambitious step is to build out a full social ad campaign management tool, currently in beta.

The post Kenshoo’s Attribution Weightings Give Big Brands Smart Local SEM appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

As local businesses increasingly transition their advertising dollars online, they expect agencies and publishers to furnish them with simple, consolidated solutions supported by tangible, trackable ROI. MerchEngines built its white-label “relationship generation” system to enable online marketing providers to do just that for their SMB clients.

In a crowded online marketplace, where bigger firms such as ReachLocal, Yodle and WebVisible also compete to service SMB agents, MerchEngines’ value proposition is the comprehensiveness of the toolkit that publishers can implement and local merchants can benefit from.

There are eight key features in the suite, including a “SocialStream” layer that tracks activity across four prominent social networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google Buzz).

PPC search campaign management is fundamental to online search offerings, and MerchEngines is no different, supplying a single interface to customize, amend and track campaigns across multiple search engines. Tied to both SEM and social is CallAnalytics, the branded service that allows SMBs to establish call-tracking numbers and monitor traffic from both search and social.

Also of note is OneList, which disseminates a local merchant’s listing across more than 40 business directories (Yelp, Superpages.com and many more). The eight-tool portfolio is encompassed in a single online dashboard that agencies and publishers can conveniently access to monitor and change campaigns.

MerchEngines was founded in 2005 by longtime Internet executive Andy Steuer. In 2009 it sold to Hostopia, the Web site hosting unit of Deluxe Corp.

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The latest move is to enter the local search wars, going up against the Yellow Pages; third-party resellers like ReachLocal, Yodle, WebVisible and Orange Soda; and direct customers of Google AdWords itself. The effort, which is a partnership with Clickable, extends earlier efforts that provide SMBs with online payment processing, comprehensive insurance information, and international payment and wire transfers.

According to VP of Business Solutions Rob Ciccone, it is all part of an effort to “provide a portfolio of tools to help SMBs grow revenue. We have excellent knowledge of SMB needs [and] a very large customer base,” he says. Those are supplemented by non-customers who are users of Amex’s OpenForum site, which provides articles and boards and e-mail links for a wide variety of SMB topics.

The Search Manager product itself has some advantages for SMBs, adds Ciccone. Most notably, it uses Clickable to manage search across multiple search engines, including not only Google, but Yahoo, Bing and Facebook as well. The product also includes a daily recommendation feature for improving campaigns. SMBs that don’t want to manage their own campaigns can use Search Manager Assist, although that carries a higher premium of 8 percent to 10 percent per month. The price of unassisted search is 5 percent of ad spend, or $49 per month — whichever is higher.

The search products are initially being promoted at trade shows and to the credit card and OpenForum list. They include a 30-day free trial.

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