Nationwide Report: Online Restaurant Reviews per State

At the request of our customers, we have been gathering nationwide rich data on restaurants. We now have a database of close to 1 million businesses in the food & dining vertical with rich details including but not limited to menus, special features, descriptions and user reviews. The data was gathered from over 70 local and vertical sites.Compiling a nationwide analysis of user reviews of restaurants, we took the total number of restaurants we found in each state and checked how many of them have at least one user review on at least one site.
The map below shows what percentage of restaurants, in each state, has one or more user reviews on at least one site.

 

The three states at the top of the list, where over 23% of restaurants have at least one user review, are Massachusetts, Washington and California.Palore can provide information on small businesses from hundreds of sites in any vertical and any market, including ad spending data. If you’re interested in a custom project contact us here.

Where are SMBs Advertising these Days?

Our previous post featured statistics on attorneys who advertise on Internet Yellow Pages sites. While working on several projects for customers in the food & dining and nightlife verticals, we gathered initial advertising data from 30 leading local, vertical and IYP (Internet Yellow Pages) sites.

We stumbled upon some interesting facts regarding SMBs online advertising patterns. We focused on whether Boston restaurants and NYC night clubs advertise on a single site* or on multiple sites.

The following two charts show the results:

 

* By “single site” we mean that the advertiser has elected only to advertise on one site – not that only one site is the preferred choice of all “single site” advertisers.

It wasn’t very surprising to see that most of the businesses in the verticals we looked at advertise on a single site, e.g. 74% percent of online advertisers among Boston restaurants. Also, it was interesting to see that the number of businesses that advertise on multiple sites is larger than we expected, e.g. as many as 13% of online advertisers among Boston restaurants advertise on 2 sites. An additional 13% advertise on 3 sites or more amounting to a little over a quarter of Boston online advertising restaurants that advertise on more than a single site.

There may be an opportunity here for local search sites to approach local business owners who advertise only on one site and interest them in larger, potentially more effective campaigns – Palore offers such sales lead services.

Another interesting point about the data we’ve extracted is that despite the differences between the target audiences of Boston restaurants and NYC clubs, the advertising patterns seem very similar.

As always, we’d love to hear what interests you. Contact us here to suggest analyses or order a custom project.