Advertisers who use FindWhat.com don’t even need a Web site, because the company creates business profile pages that load when users query keywords relevant to an advertisers’ business. Yahoo!’s Overture offers LocalMatch, a product that makes a similar hosted contact page available to advertisers in its network.
When they sign up for FindWhat’s pay-per-call, advertisers provide their basic contact information–such as location, operating radius, which keywords they think are relevant to their business, and how much they’re willing to pay for each call. The minimum bid for pay-per-call is $2, according to FindWhat, a performance-based marketing technologies provider….
…FindWhat.com is the first major ad network to offer the new advertising technology, which belongs to tech firm Ingenio, Inc. The FindWhat.com partnership is a major win for Ingenio, which needs distribution if pay-per-call is going to get off the ground.
But here’s the interesting market data, for you infoporniacs:
According to local market research firm The Kelsey Group, 98 percent of the roughly 22 million businesses in the United States fall into the category of small- to-medium-sized enterprises–the precise targets for the local offerings of large ad networks like Google, Overture, and FindWhat.
Additional Kelsey data shows that small and medium-sized companies conduct most of their business locally. Eighty percent of small/medium companies make up 75 percent of their product buys and/or sales within a 50-mile radius of their business location.
Currently, only 350,000 advertisers participate in paid search worldwide. Tech providers and industry evangelists hope that the number is small because business owners don’t advertise on the Web unless they have a site; only about 30 percent of small or medium-sized businesses have a Web site, according to Kelsey.