Will US Local Ad Market Shrink?

Will the local online takeover traditional local marketing in US? Just have a look at what Kelsey Group and BIA Advisory Services say in their research report.

There is a bad news and the good news about the local advertising.

First with the bad news - The local traditional advertising will be much less in 2013 as compared to 2008. Both the firms predict a compound annual -1.4% overall growth rate, with the largest drop-off in local ad spending occurring in 2009.

The traditional media spend in 2008 is $141 billion and is forecasted to fall to $112 billion in 2013.

Now the good news - The local online ad market is growing, will continue to grow and make up a larger percentage of the local traditional media sector. This year about 11.5% of ad spending for local will be online that means to say yellow pages, emailing, SEM etc. And this will increase to 22% in 2013.

“The share shift we expect (traditional vs digital) could actually be more pronounced if the major traditional media are not able to integrate new interactive products into their bundle,” said Neal Polachek of Kelsey.

(Source: eMarketer.com)

What More I Want In Google Adwords During This Recession?

I do agree Google Adwords is a powerful tool to get target audience to your website and generate business. But, if you see the present economy and recession, most of the advertisers will like to spend as much less as possible and even if they have to spend on advertising they will be very keen to have the best ROI they ever had. So, the better bet they can see is Adwords or other PPC ads. Content targeting does offers to target the age group and gender but, advertisers need more specific audience.

What does Adwords offer them – targeted audience to a specific location, targeting by placement and targeting by language in addition to the specific keywords they bid on. What I want Adwords to offer much more targeted ads to a more niche segment, which many advertisers may be interested in these times of recession. Apart from the geo specific, I would like to target my ads to a particular profile, title, designation, interests…etc. This way, if I want to target my ads to senior management of banking industry, then I can select this group when configuring my ads. In turn Google can show my ads to that particular audience in particular so that the advertisers get more ROI. They will also not lose on clicks and can write and design landing pages to that specific audience they are targeting for. Thus, helping them with a good CTR, quality score, low CPC and better returns.

In turn, Google will be providing quality ads/searches to that specific audience for which they are looking for.

Google India Search Masters'09

Glad to inform you that Google will have the Search Masters'09 in their office, at Bangalore on Feb 28. I guess it will have loads of information about the webmasters tools and we will know how to exploit the webmasters tools and resources available there. More over, they have a session on Google's new custom search which I would love to know more about.

If you are in Bangalore don't miss it - SearchMasters'09

SearchCamp 2009

I have been reading the emails of the guys which are working hard and effciently to make this session a great one. These young chaps are enthusiastic and trying all contacts and exploiting all enrgies to make this a succesful one.

SearchCamp is a two day event aimed to bring together the best minds from the Search Engine Marketing space to talk about search engine advertising, including optimization and marketing issues. The event is scheduled for the 28th February & 1st March 2009 at Chennai.

Cheers and best wishes to the team.