released their annual Search survey this week, in it they aggregate the results of questionnaires filled out by 587 search engine advertisers and SEM agencies. This post is going to deal with details on the local portion of that survey, and focus on the responses from the advertisers, not the agencies.
The next question was about where the money was going, in other words, which engines were the most popular among those who responded. No shocker on the top 2 - Google & Yahoo, but MSN was not third, not even fourth, it came in fifth. Third & fourth places were actually taken up by 2 of the biggest IYPs - Superpages & YellowPages (given that I work with several IYPs that’s a good sign).
The last local specific question that I’m going to touch on (for more comprehensive results / more results you’ll have to join SEMPO to get the full survey) is that of how much more would people be willing to pay for better local targeting? Over 3/4 of respondents said that they’d pay no more than 10% of a premium (42% said no more than 5%). Of course that would depend on what the ‘better local targeting’ entailed. What can the engines do to improve their targeting? Well, I found out last week that MSN doesn’t just rely on the IP address of the searcher to place them, they also use their Passport system, which makes sense given that people have signed up for that service, so they may as well get use out of it. Yahoo does allow you to set your location by clicking on the local button on their main page, and Google has made it optional to add your location information, Maybe they’ll all start making this information required, and this will be where personalization is really going to improve local search.
