I'm frequently asked who's winning in local. The answer always surprises me in how short the list is. Google wins in usage, by sheer weight of query volume. But courting a fragmented SMB market (direct and through re-sellers) continues to develop.
BIA/Kelsey's Leading in Local Conference in Boston this week spotlighted Google's Enhanced Campaigns among many themes. Its impact on mobile and local search was the focal point – following my last column, and leading up to SES New York where it...
For years Google has tried to court SMBs into search marketing through various means. This includes local sales channels (resellers) and directly to the more savvy "self-serve" SMB advertisers. The latter has taken on many forms, such as free...
Just three full weeks into 2013, and we're already off to a bang. Facebook's Graph Search is just one example of the many impactful things we can expect in fast moving tech and media marketplaces. Likewise, you can expect an action packed year at...
As the holiday shopping season kicks off with record Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales, it's a good time to examine how retailers are equipped to handle the onslaught of shopping search activity. The short answer: Most aren't.
Earlier this week, BIA/Kelsey released its U.S.mobile local advertising forecast, projecting $5.8 billion in revenue by 2016. Full disclosure: I'm the author of that forecast, so I decided to provide an exclusive breakdown of some of the mobile...
Michael Boland, program director of mobile local media for BIA/Kelsey, says the growth of mobile local media has a lot to do with the penetration of smartphones in the U.S.marketplace. Growth drivers include smartphone penetration, location data...
In other words, Passbook's true identity – to paraphrase Michael Corleone – has yet to reveal itself. Though this has lots of important implications for mobile local search (and for Google), it overshadowed other impactful features of the operating...
As hotly anticipated, earlier this week Apple pulled the curtain back on the iPhone 5. It also gave a closer look at the previously announced iOS6 operating system that will run the device, among other Apple products.
As mobile and local continue to collide, we're seeing lots of evidence that localized content boosts user engagement. That also translates to higher performance and monetization for mobile ads. But one thing often ignored is what exactly we mean...
An ongoing battle cry in the world of mobile local search is how location targeting can boost performance and bring higher premiums to mobile ads. That goes for both search and display ads, and represents a growing batch of mobile ad networks and...
Of all the topics in the hot mobile location space, mobile monetization seems to be the biggest question mark. Though ad networks and search engines like Google see real revenue, mobile local leaders like Foursquare and Yelp haven't done much...
Last month, we looked at the U.S.mobile ad revenue forecast, drilling down on search's growth and dominance among ad formats (i.e.search, display, SMS, video). Another important breakdown is the portion of ad dollars going towards location targeted...
This increase seems somewhat consistent to the predicted local segment of U.S.mobile ad revenues, as referenced by Michael Boland: from $784 million in 2011 to just over $1.3 billion in 2012. Among the four categories of this U.S.mobile ad revenue...
In the ongoing cycle of market forecasting, we're once again at a half-year refresh for mobile local ad revenue projections. Though the revenue outlook is the "money" number, there are lots of background inputs to dissect, such as mobile search...
We've long looked at the online-offline gap. This comes down to the challenge in connecting the dots between increasing levels of online research and the sheer volume of offline spending (95 percent of U.S.retail).
Trover is a mobile local discovery app (iOS and it's backed by General Catalyst, Ignition, and Benchmark Capital. The app is built around "spatial browsing" and puts images at the center. Co-founder and CEO Jason Karas contends this is a...
'Tis the season for top 10 lists. I guess I'm playing right into the cliché. However instead of looking back at "best of" fodder, I recently decided to partake in some forward looking speculation -- what us analysts do best (or worst).
I was recently questioned by a colleague who was surprised to learn after all the talk about mobile apps and smartphones, that Google doesn’t have a richer library of apps. By that, I mean Google lacks many native apps for platforms like iOS...
Last week I was lucky enough to speak at eBay's Innovate developer's conference in San Francisco where the company introduced and gave more definition to its x.commerce platform. As background, x.commerce is meant to be the uber platform for small...
