Local Paid Search is the art of building pay per click (PPC) campaigns focused on local conversion through retail stores, agents, or distributors, and is a popular strategy among top brands that rely on local foot and phone traffic. However, as a national brand, building and optimizing PPC campaigns for each of your individual locations as if it were your ONLY location is often unattainable in practice, stretching your marketing team to overload, or requiring an abundant amount of paid agency time. So what are national brands to do? Smart brands are increasingly turning to automation technology. And here's why...

1. BALIHOO IS PURPOSE-BUILT
FOR LOCAL SEARCH AND
DISPLAY MARKETING EXECUTED
BY NATIONAL BRANDS.
DIGITAL MARKETING
MANAGER, ENTERPRISE
BID MANAGEMENT USER
SEM MANAGER, ENTERPRISE
BID MANAGEMENT USER
Most multi-location brands simply don’t have the manpower
to manually execute individual campaigns for each location.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Managers are in high demand,
with salaries rising dramatically each year.
SETUP AND MAINTENANCE
REPORTING
OPTIMIZATION USING DATA
DYNAMIC CREATIVE AND KEYPHRASES
In 2015 alone, the
approximate number
of posted
job openings for
SEM Managers
skyrocketed to
22,900.4
25% of Digital
Marketers note ‘Metrics
and Analytics’ as being a
top challenge.9
42% of SEM buyers
review campaign
reporting in spreadsheet
attachments.10
35% of franchise brands
don’t track ROI on their
local marketing spend
at all.13
Four out of five customers want ads that are customized
to their city, zip, or immediate surroundings.2
According to Google, using local
sitelinks can improve click-through
rate by nearly 30%.8
“[Our platform’s]
location targeting is
extremely cumbersome
and does not allow for
much flexibility. I usually
have to go directly into
Adwords to set up
locations one by one.”
“Updating budgets
takes me four to
eight hours across
all my locations for
a single brand.”
Paid Search Managers who are accustomed to creating nationwide
campaigns often struggle with the time required to launch,
maintain, and optimize ad campaigns for each location. These
same managers end up spending most of their day delving into
spreadsheets, downloading and uploading large files to make
minor keyword adjustments, and striving (but often failing) to
optimize ad copy. A lack of appropriate features in traditional bid
management platforms causes a painful growth spurt that modern
marketing teams are essentially unprepared to handle.
Not only are Paid Search Managers under increased pressure to provide relevant
top-line metrics, they also feel the squeeze from local partners to provide insight
into the street-level benefits of campaigns. Enterprise bid management platforms
can’t report across campaigns for a single location, again putting the burden on
digital strategists to become spreadsheet experts.
Approximately 543,000 new
local small businesses open
their doors each month.14
Many of these businesses are
local outlets and partners for
national brands.
Cost per click (CPC)
increases a whopping 400%
when Quality Score is ‘Poor’
(compared to ‘Average’).10
SEM managers for multi-location brands struggle
to keep up with new locations, closed locations,
changes in hours, and product offerings - not to
mention maintaining optimal targeting for
campaigns that only affect a segment of locations,
such as underperforming stores or stores in areas
with certain weather conditions. Under-optimized
campaigns lead to low Quality Scores, higher
costs, and fewer qualified clicks.
Ask any Digital Marketing Manager at a national brand about
keyword spreadsheets, and you’ll surely get a bevy of complaints
about the practice. But without automation, the only way to localize
key phrases, ad copy, and display creative across hundreds of
locations is to burn the midnight oil versioning out individual creative.
Lacking automation, this potential resource drain is a necessity for
multi-location brands that strive to provide the locally relevant ad
campaigns their target consumers look for and respond to.
1. Google
2. Understanding Consumers’ Local
Search Behavior, Ipsos MediaCT
sponsored by Google, 2014
3. Ad/Doubleclick for comScore
4. USNews
5. LinkedIn
6. Indeed
7. Hubspot
8. Ascend 2 and Research Partners
9. Metamarkets
10. Bruce Clay
Through automation, the Balihoo platform does the same things
at scale that you would do if you were managing ad campaigns
for a single location. This means that each location always has its
own budget and daily pacing, target radius or zip codes,
customized text and display ads, and reporting dashboard.
For every campaign you run, Balihoo builds hundreds or thousands of
customized, geo-specific versions of your professionally developed text and
display ads. This means you receive the benefit of increased performance that a
local strategy affords, while avoiding the headache of generating complicated
spreadsheets and individual campaign assets one-by-one.
Across all careers,
SEO/SEM marketing was
among the top five skills
that effectively got
marketers hired in 2015.5
In 2015, Google reduced the number of organic local listings
displayed on desktop and mobile by 58%, thus increasing the
opportunity for paid ads to be displayed.
“Local is arguably the most important part of the search
market because of its financial impact.”
WHY IS LOCAL PAID SEARCH
SO DIFFICULT TO EXECUTE?
WHY IS LOCAL PAID SEARCH
SO DIFFICULT TO EXECUTE?
LOCAL PAID SEARCH IS
BECOMING MORE CRITICAL
LOCAL PAID SEARCH IS
BECOMING MORE CRITICAL
To learn more about Balihoo Local Paid Search,
visit Balihoo.com/solutions
BALIHOO.COM
THE PROBLEM WITH
LOCAL PAID SEARCH
Why it’s Almost Impossible to Execute,
No Matter How Hard You Try
Local Paid Search is the art of building pay per click (PPC)
campaigns focused on local conversion through retail stores,
agents, or distributors, and is a popular strategy among top brands
that rely on local foot and phone traffic. However, as a national
brand, building and optimizing PPC campaigns for each of your
individual locations as if it were your ONLY location is often
unattainable in practice, stretching your marketing team to
overload, or requiring an abundant amount of paid agency time.
So what are national brands to do?
Smart brands are increasingly turning to
automation technology.
Searches conducted with “local intent” have
increased 34-fold since 2011.1
2011 ......................................................... TODAY
Searches with “local
intent” convert to sales
at twice the rate of
non-local searches.15
searches are
conducted every
single month.14
2.6
BILLION
More than
SEO
SEM
Over the past three
years, the average
salary for an SEM
Manager in the
United States has
risen more than
30%.6
A shortage of skilled and affordable Search Engine
Managers often translates to overworked teams,
human error, minimal time for optimization, and
oversimplified and ill-performing strategies. One
strategy in particular that is often overlooked,
postponed, or outsourced is Local Paid Search.
4 Roadblocks to Executing Local Paid Search
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
The number of pages of forms
required to create an ad
campaign for a single location in
a popular enterprise bid
management solution
F O U R
40%
The percentage
of platform
features that
enterprise bid
management
users estimate
they are able to
use when
executing local
campaigns.12
“Pausing campaigns, updating negative
keywords, updating geo-targeting and ad copy
updating are all processes that are overly
complicated and time consuming. No ties to
data means no automation.”
DIGITAL MARKETING MANAGER,
ENTERPRISE BID MANAGEMENT USER
Localized
display ads see
315%
higher click-through
rates.3