We’ve recently started analyzing the data we aggregate from several advertising channels and there is an abundance of interesting information out there.
With the tools we’re developing, we can produce detailed reports on advertising activities of SMB’s online. A good example of such a report would be a list of plumbers who advertise online in California.
At the request of several of our customers, we have begun to turn our attention to Internet Yellow Pages sites. In general, IYP’s offer businesses 2 types of listings: free listings that usually contain only the basics like name, address and phone number and paid listings with more details and better placement.
Here are a couple of examples of the initial data we can expect. We took a look at attorneys listed on IYP’s - the charts show the percentage of paid listings out of all listings (free + paid) in a number of categories.
This initial analysis of our sample data shows that the number of attorneys who purchase online advertising packages on IYP’s varies as we look at different types of legal practices. In LA, for instance, out of attorneys listed and categorized on IYPS’s, there is a higher percentage of advertisers among accident & personal injury attorneys than among criminal law attorneys.
In NYC, the highest percentage of attorneys listed on IYP’s who purchased advertising packages was among bankruptcy attorneys.
We can, as shown in the samples above, perform analyses on several local markets and provide nationwide analyses on various categories of small businesses.
We’re very excited about where these new analyses can take us and we’d love to hear what interests you. Contact us here to suggest analyses or order a custom analytics project.
The restaurant business is not an easy one and when you decide to open a restaurant you have to consider various factors such as location. A very basic decision you have to make is cuisine - what kind of food will your restaurant serve. See how the results of a short study conducted on the distribution of restaurants last week can help with this decision.
We used our rich nationwide dataset of food & dining businesses and looked at the distribution of 3 types of cuisine: sushi, Italian and Chinese, in 5 cities: Boston, New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles. The results are presented in the following charts:
The business opportunity here is obvious: less than 0.4% of Chicago restaurants offer Sushi, while in other cities, it’s 3 to 5 times more common.
Analysis of other types of cuisine yielded results that are less exceptional, but still interesting:
• Italian restaurants are 116% more common in Boston than they are in LA.
• Chinese restaurants are 114% more common in SF than they are in LA.
Interested in similar information on other local businesses or want to know more about the Food & Dining industry? Contact us here.
Any other kind of statistics or analysis you’d like to see on our blog? Drop us a comment.
Our previous post discussed a recent poll indicating most consumers research a restaurant online prior to visiting it. Looking at the various restaurant details available online, we chose to examine and present the online coverage of 3 very different attributes: user reviews, parking and wine details. Our assumptions are that most users are interested in peer reviews, many are also interested in parking information and only a small percentage of users are interested in wine details.
Imagine our surprise to find that user reviews are available for only 16% of LA’s food & dining businesses.
Previous statistics suggest the Boston food and dining industry has wide online presence. This is also reflected here, where we see that the highest percentage of user reviews available for restaurants - 36% - is again in Boston.
As for parking information, various websites indicate whether street, valet or lot parking is available for a restaurant. This information is least available for the NYC area - parking information is provided for only 9% of restaurants.
However, restaurant wine details availability online is the highest for NYC restaurants - users can see wine lists and prices for 19% of restaurants in New York.
Palore extracted these statistics while gathering business data from 20 leading local and nationwide search sites, covering over 100,000 restaurants in major US cities. Custom content projects on any vertical are available - contact us here for more information.
Boston Restaurants Connect with Consumers Online
May 6, 2008
While collecting information on businesses in the food & dining vertical we’ve come across many interesting details about restaurants; one of these details is a restaurant’s website.
Many restaurants use websites to interact with their customers. In fact, a recent online poll by AIS Media shows that “89% of consumers have researched a restaurant online prior to visiting a restaurant, and 57% of customers said that they check out the restaurant’s website.”
It was therefore interesting to find that percentages of restaurants operating a website vary from one city to another, and that the city with the largest percentage of restaurants with websites is Boston.
The following chart shows our statistics:
With 33% of restaurants operating a website in Boston and 21% in LA & NYC, a Boston restaurant is 57% more likely to operate a website
We haven’t had the chance to go into what each restaurant offers on its site. However, a quick examination of other attributes such as online menu shows that Boston restaurants lead the chart with more online presence. Be sure to check out our coming posts to get the figures for more comparisons.
As always - if you think of other criteria or data comparisons you’d find interesting, please share your thoughts with us.
To order rich local business content in any vertical, contact Palore’s sales team.
Subscribe here
