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Local Search Marketing Worth $1 Billion This Year
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Dublin, Ireland - (Cheap Web Hosting Directory) - March 27, 2006 - Local advertisers will invest $1 billion into search advertising this year, an amount that is expected to double by next year, according to a Research and Markets study.
Research and Markets' ''Local Advertisers Plow $1 Billion Into Search'' report states that from $25 million in Atlanta to $220,000 in tiny Zanesville, Ohio, local businesses have begun spending larger amounts on search advertising. Local advertisers now occupy one-third of the links on city-related keywords and will spend nearly $1 billion this year to draw traffic from the search engines.
The report focuses on what is now a tiny spot on the wall - the $420 million that local businesses placed last year in search advertising. That spot will more than double in size this year to nearly $1 billion, and nearly double again next year, reaching more than $4 billion by 2010. The biggest concern for web sites run by traditional local media companies is that they face being walloped by something that should be all too familiar with - targeted media.
Tracking advertising categories is difficult, until they reache about $300 million, and the figures remain a bit unstable until they reach $1 billion. Last year was the first time local advertising categories appeared on the local radar as a trackable ad category, hitting about $420 million. This year it is estimated to hit $1 billion, allowing even further analysis.
The report attempts to offer a ground-up look at local paid search, from a local media perspective and includes insights of the 400-member advertising panel. It also provides a list of vendors offering turnkey solutions to local media, plus a market-by-market list of national and local paid search spending projections for 210 U.S. Cities.
In a few short years the national search engines have grown into multibillion dollar behemoths that have begun pick-pocketing local media companies. Anecdotal stories from smaller businesses tell of wholesale shifts of ad budgets out of traditional media - namely newspapers, yellow pages and direct mail - and into search engine advertising.
Web business operations continue to rely almost exclusively on selling banners and listings, a form of online advertising that will grow slowly then decline as local paid search takes over. Vendors with local search applications are clamoring to help companies catch up. Local media companies should have one foot on the local search/local commerce bandwagon already, with plans to ''go deep'' in this area. It's a question of survival.
Local advertisers have gone beyond experimenting. Eighteen months ago they occupied 5.6 percent of sponsored links on the major search engines; today it's more than one-third. For some categories like real estate, local agents are buying half the sponsored links.
What does the future hold for local search advertising? A panel of 400 advertising experts foresee the likelihood of yellow pages morphing into web directories, search engines morphing into local directories, and a locally focused search engine perhaps trumping them all.
To learn more about the report, please visit: www.researchandmarkets.com/reports/c34834.
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