Here at Palore, we recently finished working on a large scale project in San Diego County, covering all businesses in all categories, from more than 10 leading local, vertical and IYP sites – a total of 168,466 businesses.

The fact that the number of total businesses we reached exceeds the one published by some data providers by about 35,000 businesses can be explained by several things. Our data is based on multiple and diverse sources that may have both new businesses that don’t appear elsewhere and closed businesses whose listings have yet to be updated.

In the following chart you can see what percentage of San Diego SMBs advertise online, including all types of ads, from video ads to graphically enhanced listings. Non-advertisers are businesses with only “plain vanilla” free listings.

The percentage of advertisers in this chart is exceptionally high and goes against common opinion. We therefore took a second look and made a distinction between “pure online advertisers” and “bundled or extra-small advertisers”, who spend $10 a month or less or have some form of online advertising that may have been bundled with another product they purchased, such as a print ad. Bundling print and online ads is quite common, as reflected in an interview with Frank Jules, President & CEO of AT&T Advertising & Publishing, recently published on The Kelsey Group Blog.

This division paints a very different picture as you can see in the second chart below.

The chart above changes the numbers dramatically as it reveals that most of the businesses we originally identified as online advertisers are probably “bundled or extra-small advertisers”.

Online marketers, like many of Palore’s customers, want to approach SMBs who already advertise online – these businesses have a higher awareness of the importance of online advertising and it is easier to sell them online marketing services. Such companies need to distinct between different advertisers and find the SMBs who understand the value of significant online presence. 

Hanan Lifshitz is CEO and Noa Gertin is Director of Marketing at Palore, a provider of local businesses’ advertising data and information on their online activity. They also blog at The Palore Blog. The Small Is Beautiful column appears on weekly at Search Engine Land.

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.

Related Topics: Channel: Other | Small Is Beautiful