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.

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.

We’ve been having many talks with sites that are interested in integrating Palore’s rich local content. As some of you know, we’ve started providing local search sites and IYP sites with feeds of our content that enrich their sites.  

We’re currently working with two types of sites: Local sites that have a variety of information on businesses in specific locations (e.g. Los Angeles, Boston, etc.), and vertical sites that have in depth information on a specific attribute or characteristic of businesses on establishments nationwide (e.g. vegetarian, wi-fi information, etc.). It’s interesting to see how vertical sites (such as menu sites) want reviews and descriptions (basic info on various locations), and local sites (such as city guides) want menus, wi-fi information and wine details to enrich their content.  

Well, you know that there’s an abundance of information out there and it’s a good feeling to know that we can save our partners scraping efforts and multiple business development deals (See Fred Wilson‘s Business Development 2.0 post).