business

In our experience with search engine advertising, one of its unique aspects is that, in addition to directly generating online sales or leads, its robust settings provide an excellent tool for business research and planning. In the creation and management of search engine ads, the campaigns, ad groups, and more granular settings gather a great deal of useful data. This is particularly true for Google AdWords. When specifically set up for testing, the potential is a marketer’s dream. For example, we control the following primary variables:

Before going further, we should describe what we mean by local businesses. Some have asked us, “isn’t every business local to some place?” The answer is yes, however, for this discussion, a local business sells products or services to customers or clients in their local geographic area. In contrast, an e-commerce site that sells products to customers statewide or nationwide does not fit the definition of a local business.

In their print version, November 29th-December 5th issue – page 65, The Economist ran an article on online advertising. The article predicts that online ads “will be relatively unscathed in the downturn”. We have seen this theme echoed elsewhere recently. Although we were glad to read it from such an esteemed source, as search marketers this prediction was not really a surprise to us.

In the article, the writer pointed out good reasoning for their prediction, and we found one observation in particular worth our follow up. Midway through their article, they wrote: