Archive for April 25th, 2009

The problem with local reviews

Published April 25, 2009 local , reviews Leave a Comment

I love local reviews.  And local review sites like Yelp.  And I’m delighted to see reviews becoming increasingly commonplace – expected really – at local search sites from Google to yellow page publishers.

My problem is that I don’t know any of these people, so I don’t know if they like the same things as me.

My parents are small town people.  When they are looking for a place to eat they want value for money.  They want good food but nothing too exotic — and they don’t want to spend a lot of money.

I usually want something exotic — a bit unusual and out of the way.  But not too expensive.  And not TOO exotic.

So, my problem is that I don’t know if a reviewer is me or my mom.  Sure, if they’ve written enough reviews and I spend enough time reading them, I can probably get a sense of it.  But really, I was just looking for something to eat.  That shouldn’t need to be a major research project.

How do I know if my Yellow Page ad is working?

Published April 25, 2009 tracking , yellow pages 1 Comment

I recently hired a local graphic designer to create a predictabuy logo.  At the end of our meeting, she asked how we found her.

She wanted to know because she had just been talked in to putting a display ad in the print yellow pages for the first time.  She was concerned about whether or not this had been a wise decision.  Short of asking people she has no way of knowing whether or not the ad is working for her.

I told her about tracking numbers.  Just place a unique phone number in the print ad.  Whenever that number gets called, you know it’s because of the ad.

You can get very sophisticated solutions for doing this from a company like Telmetrics.  I think yellow page publishers should be offering this as service.

But after the meeting, my wife suggested an even better solution for most small businesses:  just take out a second phone number with a distinctive ring on your existing phone line.  Cheap, easy – and you know right away when you’ve got an incoming call from your yellow page ad!

And every month the phone company sends you a performance report on your yellow page advertising – the call details for your second phone number.

Nice.

(BTW: It turns out my wife did use the yellow pages to find the graphic designer.  Sort of.  She used it to find a list of graphic designers in Edmonton.   She only considered the ones with websites.  We then examined the portfolios of the different designers.  Seems like there should be a better way eh?)

What is predictabuy?

Published April 25, 2009 Predictabuy Leave a Comment

Predictabuy is a start-up providing software and services to local information publishers.

We provide advertising recommendations that improve ad relevance resulting in increased advertising revenue for  publishers.  Our recommendations are based on where a user is, their current situation (such as time, date and weather) and their personal preferences.  We learn how to make recommendations by analyzing past and current local search history.

Predictabuy recommendations are able to improve on traditional targeting methods by appropriately taking  into account many more factors and dynamically generating recommendations based on real-time conditions.  This slices a local publishers inventory more finely and with greater precision allowing more accurate selection of the most valuable advertising and higher participation rates.

By building models of individual and aggregate consumer behavior from a publisher’s search logs Predictabuy lets both publishers and consumers realize the value inherent in this data.

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