search advertising

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:

From our experience with search engines, online ads, and local advertisers, we can say with certainty that searchers looking for products or services to be purchased locally often do not include the name of their city, town, or zip code in their searches. We’re talking a lot of the time…around half or more in some verticals. From the search perspective, this is significant, because including a city name usually triggers local natural search results as opposed to what we’ll call national results to contrast the two.