AdWords Express- Did Google Get it Right?

Google is continually launching changes to its AdWords online advertising service, and it recently rolled out AdWords Express in an aim to help smaller businesses more easily create and run keyword-targeted ads on Google and Google Maps.



Many small business owners have dabbled in AdWords, only to find it costly and complex. So any move by Google to make it easier for merchants to master the complex art and science of keyword advertising is a step in the right direction. But the new AdWords Express service does not solve all of the challenges that small businesses have experienced with AdWords, including a financially-impactful lack of control and the ability to reach intentional, targeted customers.



AdWords Express does include a number of helpful features for small business users, such as a simple campaign setup and no ongoing campaign management. The promise is that business owners will not have to bid on keywords, but will instead simply provide a bit of information about their business, set a monthly budget, and let Google do the rest– setting up, running, and managing ads for the user.



The result, according to the Google AdWords Express site is the following: “When people search your area for the products or services you provide (”flowers in Dallas”, or if they’re already in Dallas, just “flowers”) an ad for your business will appear above or beside their search results. Your business will also be marked with a distinctive blue pin on Google Maps, helping it stand out to potential customers.”



But while the nuts-and-bolts of Google AdWords Express may be simple, even for non-savvy advertisers, there are disadvantages to the program. For one, targeting is based on a searcher’s IP address – which is, at best, 20 miles around a zip code and in the worst case, hundreds of miles away. Someone searching for flowers 100 miles from Dallas may get ads for florists in Dallas – not very helpful to that searcher and not very useful to the florist in Dallas, either. IP-based geo targeting is often wrong or inaccurate, and even when it is accurate, it may only reflect the location of the consumer and not where she would like to have the service rendered.



Additionally there are issues with intent and return on investment. Without a method for vetting who will see a given add, business owners could lose hundreds of marketing dollars in wasted paid traffic at the hands of casual, click-happy Internet surfers who may not represent the intended target audience or aren’t interested in the offerings presented. If Express isn’t producing the right return on investment, what does an advertiser do? They don’t know their bid and can’t optimize geography, making cancellation the only option left.



Advertisers still need to develop and optimize ad copy to maximize click rates. Remember, just because Google makes this process simple, doesn’t mean they are giving up on maximizing yield (revenue) per search.



The bottom line is that Google AdWords Express is a step in the right direction to serve the needs of the small business community, but it doesn’t go far enough to meet the needs of local merchants. The service is almost too simplistic; local businesses need robust, targeted location-based marketing, not just a one-size-fits-all approach. What Google has launched will make it easier to advertise on the site. But they’ve also just made it easier for local business owners to spend a significant amount of hard-earned money resulting in discouragement coupled with little to no ROI .

SF Chronicle covers battle for local ad space highlighting MerchantCircle

On Sunday, the San Francisco Chronicle ran an in depth look at the race for market leadership in the local online ad space.  The report by James Temple covered a number of the hotter issues in the marketplace including mobile search, anti-trust issues and Google's dominating Place Pages. When discussing local content and databases the reporter leverages MerchantCircle co-founder Ben Smith's insights while highlighting the mark our company has made to date. 



You can read the whole story here

The Best Place For the Local Consumer Search Experience

From day one, we've been committed to providing you with the best tools and products to attract and engage local consumers. Whether it's tools to blog, build coupons, send e-Newsletters, or advertise on search engines like Google and Yahoo, you've been able to do everything easily and effectively. Our network of 800,000 local merchants, now sees more than 20 million unique consumer visitors a month!

With our new partnership with Demand Media, (read the press release here or here), you can now add dynamic, unique business content on your local listings. Say you're a consumer searching for a local auto mechanic, once you get to a MerchantCircle member's listing, not only will there be your created content (blogs, newsletters, pictures, coupons, etc.), you can also have content like the articles shown below on automotive issues and news. This will give your potential customers a truly one-stop shop for all their business-specific needs and interests.



Find out more about adding Rich Content through your MerchantCircle dashboard here. eNom, a Demand Media company, will also be powering our Instant Website and unique email offering.

Sincerely,
Community Relations

Where is Bing Advertising?

Well, if you haven't heard, Bing is the highly acclaimed new search engine from Microsoft. Early reviews from users and critics have been good. Besides their TV spot, one online entity they're buying ads on is MerchantCircle. See below on the upper left hand side of our MerchantCircle city pages. This one from San Antonio:



Microsoft is buying the ads through Google, but a quick click-through takes you to a search of "San Antonio" on Bing.



Could this be a play to gain traction amongst "local" search? I'm not sure, but we like the Bing search results we've seen so far.

Good luck!
Community Relations

I'm Unemployed - What Can I Do?

With 6.7 percent now unemployed in the United States - or 10.3 million people - Americans are distressed to say the least. President-elect Obama has cautioned that there will be no quick or easy fixes to this crisis. As more and more people join the ranks of the unemployed, more and more people will be competing for the fewer jobs that make themselves available. While there is much to be discouraged about, there is still a lot of opportunities to be had.

There are ways to stay afloat, even if you haven't had luck getting a job and your unemployment benefits are running out. Google recently announced that their Local Business Referral Representative (LBR) program is shutting down at the end of the year. Essentially, the program was meant for LBRs to collect information from businesses for Google Maps, including hours of operation and store pictures. The LBRs would also introduce the business owners to Google Maps and Adwords.

Greg Sterling writes in his blog, that he believes Google didn't fully commit to the program and that 'Adwords itself, is not a self-service product that can be readily adopted by the mass of SMBs.' We agree with Greg, but we also believe that there was just not enough incentive for people that would've made the program lucrative enough for them.

Back in October, we introduced the MerchantCircle Marketing Advisor Program. The benefits for our advisors are a monthly reoccurring revenue from the members they sign-on to our paid products. With over 10,000 paid products sold to our merchants since December 2007, our merchant base of 655,000 is only at the early stages of being introduced to affordable, effective online advertising solutions. Even in the midst of a recession, we've argued before that marketing is one of the last things a consumer-oriented business should cut. Instead, expensive, ineffective advertising like the Yellow Pages should be the first to go.

Month over month, we've seen one of the lowest churn rates in the business. We've actually seen less business owners stop online advertisements since the economy was officially declared "in a recession." The fact of the matter is, we have over 700 Marketing Advisors who are helping local business owners find more customers online. In this economic time, this means a lot to us, and to the business owners, and quite possibly to you.

To find out how you can be a MerchantCircle Marketing Advisor - click here.

Sincerely,
Kevin
Community Relations

New Small Business Marketing Solutions and Affordable Website Design

Today, MerchantCircle and Web.com announced a partnership that will bring business owners even more options when it comes to online marketing and adds a new element, professional website design, that makes MerchantCircle a one-stop shop for all your business needs.

"We are excited to be working with MerchantCircle to offer full-service online marketing and website solutions as a complement to their popular online listing services," stated Jeff Stibel, President of Web.com. "With nearly half of all Internet users using search engines daily, the importance of having your website found within local searches is vital, as it creates awareness and new business opportunities cost-effectively."

"We are committed to helping local merchants take advantage of the Internet to grow their businesses," said Ben Smith, CEO of MerchantCircle. "We believe that Web.com's strong offering will round out the suite of high-value, low-cost online services we provide to our 600,000 members."

MerchantCircle already offers a pain-free Instant Website service, that automatically takes your MerchantCircle content and places it in an 'instant website' under a unique domain name that you choose. Several search engine marketing solutions are also available through unique partnerships with Webvisible, Citysearch, Yahoo! and Google.

We're proud to be able to take care of all your online needs, so that you can focus on your business - offline.

Sincerely,
Kevin
Community Relations

Local business owner calls MerchantCircle the "best choice" for any small brick and mortar business

Check out this blog post from Robert Vignoli, an entrepreneur from San Jose, CA. Robert, a massage therapist and online marketer recently discovered MerchantCircle.

Robert calls MerchantCircle "...the best choice out there for someone like a massage therapist or any small brick and mortar business who does not have the resources to get a $500 or more website built and/or have the knowledge to get that website positioned on the internet."

Read the entire post here.

Thanks for the endorsement Robert and best of luck!

Darren Waddell
Sr. Director of Marketing
MerchantCircle

Helping School Children this Holiday Season

Through one of our various business partnerships aimed at helping local business owners, Google has given us a holiday gift this year. Rather than send us little mouse pads and pens with the Google logo, this year they've sent us something far cooler.

It's through an organization called DonorsChoose.org where we'll be able to support a public school classroom of our choice. We can give books, art supplies, technology, field trips, or other resources to students in low-income communities.

As the largest online network of local business owners in the nation, who better to ask about local, then the local businesses that make up a community? That's why we're turning to you to ask for your recommendations. Please recommend schools that you know are in financial need or have had to shut down various school programs.

As a MerchantCircle network of over 300,000 members, let's give a great holiday gift this season to some deserving students in a deserving community.

Sincerely,
Kevin L.
Community Relations

P.S. Please email suggestions to Jennifer@MerchantCircle.com or post a comment to this blog.

Celebrate Good Times.... C'mon!

After hitting our One Year Anniversary since we launched, it's time to take a look back. When MerchantCircle launched in June of 2006, we had 5,000 business owners signed-on. Today, that number stands at 145,000!

We've added a number of new features over the course of this year to help you find more customers and have a more rewarding web experiences. Features that enable you to track what customers are saying about you on the web, features that allow you to engage and communicate with business owners all around the country, features that let you customize your MerchantCircle listing, and features that let you network across the web.

We've added a number of partners to enhance your listings and make sure that the content you create, including coupons and ads, are seen all across the web - not just on MerchantCircle. Those partners include Jingle, Judy's Book, Oodle, Edgeio, Local.com, Topix and yes, Google.

For our efforts and yours, we've been recognized by BusinessWeek, Entrepreneur, CNet, ZDNet, AlwaysOn, and TheStreet.com TV among others. It's merchants like European Esthetics and Wellness, Wedding Supplies Unlimited and Higgy's Pizzeria that make us proud that we can give hundreds and thousands of customers a month access to these business owners.

Does all this activity make us less motivated for our second year? Not at all. We've got a ton in store for you this next year, much of which we're excited to unveil, because we know this will help you maximize your web potential on the web. Also look for us to pass a quarter of a million merchants signed-on this summer!

Many of our local merchants and partners will be joining us this Thursday evening as we celebrate a successful first year. Send me your email and I'll send you details. In the meantime, thanks - for everything.

Cheers,
Kevin
Community Relations

Cultural Learnings Make Benefit Glorious Company MerchantCircle

There's low-tech and then there's me; here at work they call me No-Tech. So if I get something, which isn't often - that means we're doing something right. We realize at MerchantCircle that the overwhelming majority of you did not grow up with the internet. In fact, this year's graduating high school class is the first generation of kids who can't remember being without the internet. (Don't ask me for my sources, I read it somewhere. Either that, or I dreamt it and it made a lot sense to me when I woke up.)

We're not trying to insult anyone, (unless it's me), we just realize that we have to make things easier to understand. We want you to build content on your pages so that you can appeal to customers. For that reason, we now have a getting started guide behind your Merchant Dashboard and just completed a video web tutorial that will teach you how to blog, upload pictures, build ads and coupons, and create a newsletter. I think we're pretty darn easy to use.

I was reading this article in Newsweek about a program called Y Combinator. One of the companies mentioned in the article was called Weebly. They bill themselves as the 'easiest way to create and publish a website online.' I was super stoked because I've always wanted my own website. The other thing that I took notice to, was they received funding from Ron Conway, a guy who also invested in us. For that, he's a visionary! But really, his early investments included Google and Ask Jeeves.

So I check out this site, and it took me nearly two hours to build my website. You can check out my site by clicking here. I probably could have finished quicker but the pages were slow to load and I still didn't figure out how to keep my profile picture from disappearing - which should explain the lack of a picture on my home page. I think Weebly is really cool though, just slow and definitely hard to navigate. I can't imagine what it would be like for someone new to the web. Even though they call me No-Tech, I'm still immersed somewhat in web navigation.

Websites that let you build a website are cool, but my learnings on the web still show that built-in networks, such as MySpace (friends, family), Facebook (high school and college students), LinkedIn (business professionals) or even MerchantCircle (business owners, entrepreneurs), are easier to use and much more engaging and relevant.

Sincerely,
Kevin
Community Relations