Comments on: Thoughts & Effects of Google Local Listing Ads on PPC

By: Jan Riley

Jan Riley — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 18:59:53 +0000

I wonder how long it will take (and how many millions of dollars businesses will spend) before the average person gets tired of being saturated with paid results. I think the idea of a one price local ad is a good one and no doubt some businesses will do well using it, especailly as long as most people don’t know the difference between paid and organic results.

Kind of reminds me of the early days in banner ads – Online folks thought this was the best thing slice sliced bread and now we can see how people respond to them

Transparency is the emotional currency of the internet, and people don’t like to be hijacked, As long as Google dominates search, they can do whatever they want. However, It might be a good idea for them to remember that people also have the same choice

The idea of displacing organic results to the point of obscurity is self defeating for Google at best. It seems to me that this type of chronic over-advertising will be the beginning of the end of what has made Google successful – and that is returning the most relevant results for both searchers and advertisers.

By: Nathan Pabich

Nathan Pabich — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 19:30:36 +0000

Another thought I just had – for generic queries like “dentist”, you get a local results map page further down in the results page. Will these ads show along with implied local intent keyword like “dentist” – and will these map results still remain lower on the page as they do here in Chicago?

By: George Zlatin

George Zlatin — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 19:25:54 +0000

I like your point about diminishing returns…is the price to advertise going to be the same whether there are 100 companies advertising or whether there are 10? Also, who’s going to police whether the ads are appropriate or not. For example, if I’m not really located in San Francisco but I would like my ads to show there to get more potential traffic to my site, is Google going to let me advertise there? Seems like that would take away from a lot of people that are actually located in San Francisco and paying to be listed.