Local Advertising News from allLocal

Apr
26
2013

New Bing Places for Business Dashboard Accepts Google Feed Format

With the launch of Bing’s new Places Dashboard, Bing claims that they are making “claiming bulk listings quick and hassle-free.” Business owners now have two options for bulk uploading their data on Bing: they can either upload a file in Bing’s feed format (which has not changed significantly from the previous Bing Business Portal version), or upload in Google’s feed format (which is admittedly less comprehensive).

Google Places Sample

Bing gives users instructions on how to upload their Google listings in their new Help FAQ:

How can I import my listing information from Google Places for Business?

It is easy to import your listing information from Google through these simple steps.
Sign-in to your Google Places for Business page
Go to “Your businesses” page if not taken directly
Click the “Download your current data file” link
Download the file ( a “.csv” file) to your computer
Open the downloaded CSV file in Excel
Make the following changes
Ensure all listings have a store ID
Replace Google category names with Bing category names
You can obtain the Bing category names from the sample Excel file (“Bing Places Sample” from the “Add multiple businesses” section in the Bing Places for Business portal)
Save your changes and save the file in Excel format (run the “save as” command in Excel)
Go to the “Add multiple businesses” section in Bing Places for Business portal
Upload the saved Excel file
Specify the designated contact and click submit

Users just have to ensure that their data file is saved in excel format (not csv) and that they replace the Google categories with Bing’s approved categories.

Bing must have figured that many businesses have already bulk-claimed their listings on Google, and that using the existing feed format would reduce the number of necessary steps to get their data live on Bing.

Among the changes to the Bing feed format with the new platform, Bing is now allowing for 10 total categories (up from 6), which brings their feed format in line with Google’s (in the upgraded Google Places for Business dashboard).

It is also worth mentioning that according to the new feed format documentation, Bing is now requiring identical Business Names in a file, which was not stipulated in the feed format previously. This is likely intended to clean up the Name field and prevent spamming, e.g. “Majestic Pizza San Francisco” and “Majestic Pizza Orlando” should now both be simply “Majestic Pizza” on Bing.

May
9
2012

Local Advertising News By Sara Garrison | 1 comment

Google Places Bulk Upload Revamp: Banishing Custom Attributes

Google has rolled out some improvements to the Places bulk upload tool. From Google’s Blog:

“We’ve made many improvements and now enable the following actions:

Edit one or more of your listings’ data at once
Search through your listings, filtering by specific information or for listings with errors
Upload new listings using a data file or by adding them individually within the interface
Tell us how we can improve this new interface by clicking the “Give Feedback” link”

While the new bulk upload tool does seem to work more seamlessly now, Google has also quietly removed more functionality from Google Places.

Specifically, business owners are no longer able to add custom attributes to their business listings on Google Places.

From Google:

“Custom attributes from old data files
“Custom attributes are no longer supported in the new bulk listing interface. You should remove any custom attribute columns from your file before importing it into the new interface.”

Google has removed this functionality and scrapped any existing custom attributes from all listings. This means that fields such as Products, Services, Facebook Pages, Brands etc., are no longer permitted.

In short, Google no longer allows the business owner to tell them what their business is about in the Places listing details (aside from standard fields like category selection and description).

Google’s move away from custom attributes comes as no surprise given that these fields were dropped from the visible Places listings back in July ’11. However, Google’s previous stance was that these fields should still be included in listings on the back end; “it helps our system ensure that your organic listing appears and ranks appropriately on Google and Google Maps when potential customers perform searches related to your service.”

Now, Google relies more on the business owner’s website and on organic ranking triggers to tell them what a business is all about.

The removal of custom attributes resonates with Google’s Venice update in late February ‘12, which localized traditional organic results on broad search queries and placed more importance on organic search results as a ranking factor for local listings:

“Improved local results. We launched a new system to find results from a user’s city more reliably. Now we’re better able to detect when both queries and documents are local to the user.

“Improvements to ranking for local search results. [launch codename “Venice”] This improvement improves the triggering of Local Universal results by relying more on the ranking of our main search results as a signal.”

With these changes to Google Places and localized organic results at a national level, it’s clear that all businesses need to focus on local.

So take advantage of the Venice update; create unique, location-specific landing pages & website content and localize your link portfolio. At the same time, you’ll be getting past the hurdle of removed custom attributes. And as always, keep your Places listings fresh and up-to-date.

With all of these updates in Google, one thing is for certain: local has never been more important.

Jun
23
2011

Local Advertising News By Matt | Comments turned off

Your Brand and Reputation Are First Page on Google

Google is rolling out some changes to the OneBox display for local results that continue to the push the integration of local listing with the main search results. While this may just be another Google UI test, it is certainly consistent with their push to make local an integrated part of the main search experience. For brands and small businesses, this just reiterates the importance of having a local listing and reputation strategy. See a few examples below.

Photo from Places Now Included in the OneBox

Store With Optimized Places Listing vs Store Without

In the example below, you can see how the Sephora results compares to the Mac Cosmetics result. Competing brands in the same city but Sephora is taking advantage of the Google push to bring local content to the forefront by getting their storefront, hours and reputation front and center.

Implicit Local Queries Impacted

Even in cases where the user is not including a local modifier in their query, Google is pushing local content if they think they know your location and their is a local store. See the example below for Pottery Barn Kids.

These changes continue to demonstrate the importance of local content to Google and continue to demonstrate the opportunity both national brands and small businesses have to deliver a branded, rich and actionable experience directly on the Google.com first page.

Feb
1
2011

Local Advertising News By Matt | Comments turned off

A Brief History of the Local Review Space

Part of what we do at allLocal is help national and regional businesses understand how their brand is viewed at the local level. Based on this work, we have developed a rich set of data around the local review space and we thought it was time to shape this data into a bit of retrospective on the space. The earliest local review we have analyzed for our customers is from May 2002 and comes from Citysearch. In the almost 9 years since this review was written the local review space has grown…but has not really changed. The only real innovation in the space is the community / vanity aspect that Yelp brought to the table in 2004. While the number of reviews and the pervasiveness of them in the local search experience has grown, there has been no dramatic shift in the space. As for the future, I think our best bet lies with the social networks and their ability to passively collect this information as part of a conversation as opposed to the explicit ‘user writes a review’ model that we have today. After all, local reviews are so valuable because they are taking information that typically does not exist in a digital form and digitizing it…making it crunchable by an algorithm. Who says this digitization has to be done actively and can’t just be something that happens as a user lives their digital life? Enough prognosticating though, let’s get down to the data:

About The Data

~2,200 locations distributed across 4 general verticals: 45% travel, 40% retail, 13% services and 2% restaurants
Analyzed the number of reviews written at Yelp, Google, Yahoo, Citysearch and Yellowpages.com. We specifically focused on review sites that intend to have a broad appeal and because of this we left sites like TripAdvisor out of the mix. We will evaluate them in the future when we take a more vertical specific look at reviews
For each engine we looked at the number of reviews written for any of the 2,200 locations on each day between January 1, 2005 and January 30, 2011. The numbers you see tracked here are the 14 day moving average of the total number of reviews we saw written each day, divided by 2,200 to get the daily reviews per location and then multiplied by 100 to get a more readable number. Basically, we took the 14 day moving average of this: New Reviews / 2,200 * 100

The 5 Year Retrospective

Some observations based on this:

The number of new reviews created each day across the 5 engines as a whole has grown by ~10x over the last 6 years
Yahoo! had the early lead in the space but did not capitalize on it (I was able to copy and paste that line from other articles that I have mentioned Yahoo! in…)
Yelp had a slow burn in the beginning and then really broke out in the later half of 2008

The 2 Year Retrospective

When we zoom into a 2 year range, some other interesting observations emerge:

The trend is Yelp’s friend
Google permanently passed Yahoo! based on new local review growth in early 2010
Citysearch and Yellowpages continue to struggle in getting user participation on their sites (i.e., getting people to write reviews)
The pop in Google reviews in the middle of November 2010 is interesting…

The 8 Month Retrospective

Looking at the last 8 months give us a few more things to consider:

In a relative sense, Citysearch had a good holiday season and generated a bunch of new reviews from their users…though they are still far behind in an absolute sense
Yahoo! had two peaks in review activity in late 2010…and based on a quick review the bursts seems to be very methodical and almost robotic in nature. Activity like this stands out when you are dealing with what is still a relatively small data set at 2,200 locations
That Google pop is worth discussing further…so let’s add some commentary to the graph

reviews-8-month-marked

Ahh yes, Google Hotpot went live on November 15th. Looks like they got a nice pop from the launch but then quickly settled back into their (flat) trend line. Ouch….but to be fair, this analysis is not restaurant centric and Hotpot, while available across all types of business, is certainly angled towards the restaurant industry. But then the same could be said for Yelp. And speaking of Yelp, their trend line either got a nice boost from the holidays or from the Hotpot launch reminding everyone to go write some more reviews on Yelp.

This trend needs to be watched as the success of Hotpot is critical to Google. Their review aggregation approach has crumbled under the weight of Yelp and now TripAdvisor not always playing nice with Google. However, even if they do play nice a review scraped off some 3rd party site will never provide the insights that a review written directly on Google will. All the meta-data that comes along with a direct review (i.e., the history of the person who wrote the review) allows Google to place much more (or less) trust on the authenticity of the review. For scraped reviews, Google either needs to rely on the 3rd party sites to police their reviews effectively or has to make the decision themselves based on much less data. We continue to see the importance of review text rise in Google Places ranking but access to fresh and trusted reviews is needed to make that model work. Without Hotpot, Google may lose the local digitization race which, in my opinion, will ultimately decide who wins the local search race.

Thanks for taking the time to review some local reviews with us. Lots more to look at in this space and our next post about reviews will dive into either a vertical specific or a geographic specific look at the review space as both provide some interesting data.

Dec
17
2010

Local Advertising News, Stats and Numbers By Matt | Comments turned off

Google Local Search Stats for Black Friday

As promised in our post about the impacts of the October 27th Google update, we have put together a quick look at the traffic trends we saw for retails outlets on Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

About The Data

Sample (hundreds) of retail chain locations across the United States (other verticals responded differently and this analysis focuses only on retail stores)
Click and ‘click action’ data from Google Places for November 12th through December 12th
All locations have clean, complete and verified listings in Google Places

Our first step was to take a look at the number of clicks generated per day across the sample locations. We took this data and indexed the performance to the click totals on November 12th:

Click Activty Around Black Friday

Few things standout on this graph:

Not all that surprisingly, Black Friday was the best day in terms of the number of clicks generated
Local traffic popped on Cyber Monday as well
Big slowdown going into the Thanksgiving holiday
Black Friday is just a launching pad for the season with local traffic accelerating strongly starting in early December

Now we wanted to understand a bit more about the Black Friday burst versus the Cyber Monday burst – specifically if Black Friday is truly a ‘physical’ and in-store event while Cyber Monday is an online event. To do this, we simply looked at the click actions (as reported by Google) for clicks to the location’s website versus clicks for directions to the location. We used this data as a metric to help understand what people’s intent was once they found the local listing:

Going to the Website or to the Store?

The data showed a material difference in the click behavior with a full 10% of user clicks shifting from directions to website on Cyber Monday. While this data is not perfect (for example, many people going to the website just ended up using the on-site functionality to get directions) is does provide a reasonable proxy for the behavior of shoppers on these two days.

In early 2011 we will be posting an analysis of the entire 2010 holiday shopping season. Follow us on Twitter or Facebook to get the latest updates as they become available. Thanks!

Dec
9
2010

Local Advertising News, Stats and Numbers By Matt | 1 comment

Google Local Updates: Performance Impact Analysis

Right around October 27th Google rolled out an update to both how they rank their local listings and how they integrate those local listings into the main search result pages. While the 3-pack and 7-pack still exist, this layout is starting to become the norm for local listings on the main Google results page:

Example Google Results Page with Local Listings

To help understand what these changes mean to local businesses listed on Google, we have put together an analytical summary of what we saw during and after this update.

About The Data

Sample of retail chain locations across the United States (other verticals responded differently to the change and these number apply only to retail stores)
Click and Impression data for October 18th through November 14th, as reported in Google Places
Removed outliers based on total number of clicks and/or impressions
All the locations have clean, complete and verified listings in Google Places

Summary of Results

Significant CTR improvements
Some of the CTR improvement is driven by increased impressions for branded traffic
The number of reviews for a location seems to have impacted overall traffic growth for the location
The average review rating does not seem to be connected to overall traffic

Details and Graphs

The impact of the change is clear when looking at the clicks and impressions:

Clicks and Impressions (Indexed to 10/27)

Clicks grew over 50% in the ~2 weeks following the update while impressions grew only ~15% — implying that a majority of the click benefit came from increased CTR. This leads to the question of “did the query stream change?”. To help answer that, we took a look at the growth in clicks and the growth in the percentage of branded traffic:

Clicks and Percentage of Branded Traffic (Indexed to 10/27)

While the update did drive a noticeable and material change in the percentage of branded traffic (up over 10%), that change alone did not account for a majority of the increase in overall traffic to the locations.

So, good clean listings seem to have benefited from the update…but how do reviews play into the performance equation? To help answer this we took a look at the click growth for locations that had received 3 or more reviews in the last 6 months versus those that have received 2 or less:

Clicks by Number of Reviews (Indexed to 10/27)

The locations with 3 or more reviews performed better after the update. Now, this does not mean more reviews = better ranking. It could simply be that more reviews is just a good proxy for the overall number of citations a location has. That said, this data does provide additional evidence that the more times Google can find matching information about your business location on the web the better it is for your ranking.

With the recent discussions around how rating could/should/does impact ranking, we also took a look at the click growth based on the average rating for the sample locations. We split the locations into two buckets, one for those with a rating over 3.5 and the other for those with rating of 3.5 or lower. Each bucket had an average right around 5.5 reviews per locations (to help deal with the impacts that total number of reviews could have on the analysis). Here is what we saw:

Click Performance by Averge Rating (Indexed to 10/27)

Click by Averge Rating (Indexed to 10/27)

Based on this data, the poorly rated locations actually saw better click growth than the strongly rated locations. While not definitive, it certainly points to the average rating being ignored by Google at this point (but not by your potential customers!). And this actually makes a lot of sense given the issues we have seen with Google importing 3rd party reviews correctly (which we will take a look at another time) and the lack of credibility of the ratings/reviews on many 3rd party sites. However, as Google (tries) to gather it’s own rating data via Hotpot they will be able to build a data set that they can trust — and can then start to use more actively in the ranking process.

If you are still reading…thanks and we will be posting an update on the holiday shopping traffic in the near future.

Oct
29
2010

Local Advertising News By Matt | Comments turned off

Mt. Everest Makes Moves to Address Online Complaints

Image via Engadget

As we discussed a few weeks ago, Mt. Everest had some online review issues. One of the most common complaints was lack of cellphone service at the top. Well, the mountain has listened and that problem has been solved. Ncell has completed the install of a 3G capable cell station at 17K feet that will apparently provide service all they way up to the summit.

In other news, there is no news on Smart Phone friendly mittens that are rated for Everest’s summit temperatures.

Oct
27
2010

Local Advertising News By Matt | Comments turned off

New Google Results Page for Local Searches

Looks like Google is using their new results page layout in much wider (or complete) distribution now. Greg Sterling has a good overview at Search Engine Land.

Oct
12
2010

Local Advertising News By Gavin | 2 comments

Mt. Everest Getting Not So Rave Reviews on Google Maps

It appears that the Online Reputation Management Agency for Mt. Everest has been sleeping on the job. The Highest Mountain in the World’s Place Page on Google Maps is receiving a mediocre 3 star rating:

Closer inspection of the reviews reveals some very unhappy customers.

Obviously, these are tongue-in-cheek reviews ala Amazon’s Three Wolf Moon T-Shirt Meme. However, they clearly display yet another reason to closely monitor online reviews for your business. In the Three Wolf Moon case, the fake humorous reviews frontpaged on every social media site, including Digg and Reddit. The huge exposure catapulted sales 2,300%, making it the top selling item in Amazon’s Clothing Store.

While review content going viral can be a boon to business, both of these instances shine the light on the fact that a small group of reviewers can highjack reviews and drastically sway the outward appearance of your product or service. Who’s to say this can’t be done by a competitor or former employee to sway public appearances. This should be a concern for any business owner, from a national chain to the small business owner. For a small local restaurant, poor local reviews can be crippling. Everest’s tourism industry won’t likely feel the effect of a few fraudulent reviews:

But consider if Everest was a new, up-and-coming restaurant in Chicago. How many of the 165,000 searches for “chicago restaurants” last month, would bother looking twice at a location with only 3 stars?

- Gavin

Sep
30
2010

Rants By Matt | Comments turned off

The Google Brand Will Never be Social

All the talk about how Google ‘must’ buy Twitter just does not make sense to me, at least not for the reasons that are being discussed. Twitter is a fine business and may mint money some day, and that alone may be a reason to buy it. However, Twitter will not solve Google’s so called ‘social problem’.

(1) Google’s ‘social problem’ was created by Facebook, but Twitter does not help Google compete with Facebook. The social graph created by Facebook is completely different than the social graph created by Twitter. The reasons people use these two applications are completely different and the types and amount of information shared is not comparable

(2) Google cannot be a social brand. I entered a relationship with Google long ago with an expectation that they would provide me with search results and email. The relationship I entered into with Facebook was based on me sharing information with others. These are two very different relationships and I don’t want Google changing the nature of our relationship, especially when they use the data I shared when I was operating under our ‘search and email only’ relationship. This is the fundamental challenge for Google. Our relationship with them is not a social one

(3) User’s do not want to mix search and social. Many of the searches we do are private in nature. We ask Google the most private and embarrassing questions we have. A social aspect to Google removes the (real or perceived) privacy users feel when they share this information with Google. Based on this, you could also argue that Facebook will never be the primary search destination for users

In my opinion, if Google wants to be successful in social they need to make a clean break with their existing services (specifically search and email). Create a new brand that uses all the powerful Google technology and brains, but is not based on an integration with existing Google tools and data…which are based on my current Google relationship. Establish a new relationship with me and then let me decide if and how I want to bring my old Google relationship into the mix.

← Older Posts

New Bing Places for Business Dashboard Accepts Google Feed Format

Google Places Bulk Upload Revamp: Banishing Custom Attributes

Your Brand and Reputation Are First Page on Google

A Brief History of the Local Review Space

Google Local Search Stats for Black Friday

Google Local Updates: Performance Impact Analysis

Mt. Everest Makes Moves to Address Online Complaints

New Google Results Page for Local Searches

Mt. Everest Getting Not So Rave Reviews on Google Maps

The Google Brand Will Never be Social

About The Local

Stay Up-to-Date

Latest

Archives

Additional Resources

Local Done Right.