YP Launches New Local Search Marketplace For National Advertisers

Once dismissed as the exclusive concern of small businesses, brands and national advertisers are recognizing the importance of location data and local search. Often, however, they have trouble operationalizing local SEO and other tactics. YP has built a new PPC platform to appeal to these national-locals called “ypSearch Marketplace.” It’s a paid-search, bidded marketplace that […]

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Once dismissed as the exclusive concern of small businesses, brands and national advertisers are recognizing the importance of location data and local search. Often, however, they have trouble operationalizing local SEO and other tactics.

YP has built a new PPC platform to appeal to these national-locals called “ypSearch Marketplace.” It’s a paid-search, bidded marketplace that taps into company’s 80 million monthly users on the PC and mobile. It’s also the infrastructure behind last week’s “one-stop shop” PPC offering for small businesses.

The new ypSearch Marketplace allows marketers to import or modify current campaigns and run them on the YP network. The tools, bidding and reporting are nearly identical to those found in Google and Bing. The question thus arises, “Why would I need to do this when location extensions and locally-targeted PPC are already available on the major engines?”

YP argues that its network audience has higher purchase-intent than general search users:

According to a recent comScore study commissioned by YP, 77 percent of people who initiated a search on YP contacted a merchant after their search and 66 percent made a purchase of goods or services from a merchant after their search.

These data about the buying intent of local users are consistent with a large body of other information in the market:

  • Local search users (especially on mobile devices) tend to convert at higher rates than general searchers
  • A higher percentage of mobile search is skewed toward local intent queries (up to 50 percent)
  • Geotargeted ads or ads that are locally relevant outperform traditional, non-geotargeted search and display
  • Local phone numbers in PPC ad copy drive 3X to 4X the conversions of 800 numbers

A 2012 Nielsen survey also found that local copy/targeting was the top driver of mobile display ad response:

Local ad preference

Source: Nielsen-xAd-Telmetrics (2012), n=1,500 smartphone users

The list of findings like this goes on. I’d be curious to hear any feedback on the new system and what kind of results people are seeing.


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About the author

Greg Sterling
Contributor
Greg Sterling is a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land, a member of the programming team for SMX events and the VP, Market Insights at Uberall.

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