Local newspaper ad revenue is shrinking dramatically. Ask any sales executive at any old style paper and they’ll confirm it. If they’re a friend, I suggest you have a hanky, a shoulder, and maybe a martini ready for them before you ask. It’s a brutal topic.

How long will it take for online ads to completely dry up the print ad revenue at old-style papers? And how much—and how much longer—will people and businesses pay to have printed pieces of paper delivered?

Thanks to Web search in general, free classified-ad granddaddy craigslist.org specifically, and uber-sites such as cars.com for rides, realestate.com for roofs, monster.com for raises, and eBay for the rest of life’s detritus, spending 50-cents at Kwik-E-Mart for a folded sheaf of dried cellulose, hoping to find what you need or want sounds, well, dumb.

Expensive display ads will continue to evaporate as businesses cut costs and reallocate ad dollars to the net to remain competitive.

Paula Tompkins, CEO and Founder of ChannelNet, a leader in marketing and selling cars through interactive technology, predicts personalized web marketing will become even more aggressive as savvy shoppers use the Internet to convince brick-and-mortar ride sellers to finally do what they’ve always purported to do: Deal.

Tompkins recently addressed car sellers in Australia, offering her take on the advantages of auto dealers providing a “highly personalized and branded web experience” instead of spending their precious ad budgets on old media:

“The cost of a typical newspaper ad in Australia is astronomical and has limited impact when compared to online marketing. A high-quality website can draw as many as five times the sales leads at a much lower cost. . . . Eighty-nine percent of automotive shoppers go online to conduct research before setting foot in a showroom. The implications this trend offers to drive both sales volume and profit are extraordinary.”

Online competitors for tight ad budgets are going to eat more of newspapers’ personal- and small-business ad “lunch” every day.

eBay has recently bought a craigslist-looky-likey competitor called Gumtree.com. Like craigslist, it’s free. For most folks it doesn’t get much better than that.

Don’t know nothin’ ’bout no online advertising? vFlyer.com helps individuals and small-to-medium-sized businesses blast the electronic world with ads.

Newcomer vlingo.com promises they’ll soon deliver on the simply elegant insight MIT media guru Nicholas Negroponte had over 10 years ago: people don’t want to dial, they want to talk. Vlingo’s software lets you speak to your cellphone about what you’re after. Sushi? It’s right around the corner. Here’s a rating from other customers, here’s a map, and here’s the phone number in case you want to call ahead.

iqZone.com allows you to take a picture and post an ad, all from your cell phone. Add in proximity search, LoMo for short, and you can meet the closest person who has the cash for your stuff at the Kwik-E-Mart and complete the transaction faster than Apu can say “We don’t sell newspapers anymore.”

The top 100 newspapers already know all this and are embracing change, not hiding from it.

According to the Bivings Report, a blog about the web-based communications industry, the New York Times has the #1 newspaper website. Their study of the top 100 newspapers in terms of paid circulation considered web features, design, aesthetics, and general usability. Their top 10 list is directly related to their previous research titled “American Newspapers and the Internet: Threat or Opportunity?”

Key points from that research:
• 96 out of 100 top papers use RSS feeds, though no papers include advertising in them.
• 92 out of 100 offer video on their sites.
• 95 offered at least one reporter blog.
• 33 of the top papers let readers comment on articles.
• 29 required users to register before gaining full access to their site, but only 3 wanted money. The rest were free.

The others in the top 10?
Washington Post
USA Today
Houston Chronicle
Denver Post
Knoxville News Sentinel
Fresno Bee
Austin American Statesman
Tennessean
San Jose Mercury News

The broadsheet has been a great medium: It’s portable, fairly durable, and allows completely random-access to information in a simple, user-friendly format. But in the hyper-connected, information-delivered-in-a-nanosecond world, consumers are not going to wait until tomorrow or the next day to find out what they want to know or buy right now; businesses will not bet their bottom lines on manual delivery of parchment to keep up with that impatient, attention-challenged consumer; and news-”papers” that want to survive the first decade of the 21st century—no matter how respected, venerable, and worthy they are—won’t either.

Ultra-personal ad floggers promise to push hand-crafted, micro-targeted messages to all of your subscription media, whether you want them or not.

Local, mobile search, “LoMo” for short, is the other side of the coin in this new, “micro-targeted” realm. It offers a very strong value proposition: Find the thing I want and find it close to me, so I can go get it now.

Cashing in on a multitude of cultural factors such as Instant-gratification, vast product choices, global vendor options, perhaps even rising gas prices, GPShopper’s local search concept is deceptively simple:

Out-and-about Ms. Consumer searches GPShopper’s “Slifter Mobile” site on her cell phone for the “something” she’s gotta have right now, and Slifter spits out the nearest store. Ms. Consumer flies, buys, and the retailer pays GPShopper a fee for the product Ms. Consumer found on Slifter.

Ms. Consumer does not need a full-blown, global, Google search on her cell phone; she just needs to know if what she’s after is in her vicinity.

According to GPShopper’s website, “If your products and store locations are in our system, customers will see them. Savvy shoppers save their favorite items to a personalized shopping list on their phone or send them to a friend or family member for future purchase consideration. Either way, customers are guided to nearby locations where they can buy your products.”

The company also promises unique, “detailed analytics” to increase sales, track campaign effectiveness and show retailers “new insights about customer behavior.”

All politics are local? Now all wireless marketing could be, too.

“Extremely targeted advertising will become indistinguishable from content.” Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital, 1995

Targeted ads are in your email, on your search pages. Companies already track your habits and push selected ad content at you. That’s old news.

But how will people feel when “ultra” personal ads start showing up 24/7 on all subscription media: inserted in TV programs, popping up on cell phones, beaming in on satellite radio?

According to an Aug. 6 story on the New York Times’ website, CEO David W. Kenny of Digitas, an ad agency recently purchased by Publicis Groupe, thinks producing these ads in offshore “ad factories” then shooting them to an electronic screen near you is the way of the near future.

Kenny’s goal is to change the digital advertising strategy for the entire Publicis worldwide conglomerate: Saatchi & Saatchi, Leo Burnett, Starcom MediaVest Group and the accounts of Procter & Gamble, American Express, Hewlett-Packard, and General Motors.

Kenny acknowledges some U.S. companies are already running thousands of ad versions for a single brand, but his vision goes much further:
“The plan is to build a global digital ad network that uses offshore labor to create thousands of versions of ads. Then, using data about consumers and computer algorithms, the network will decide which advertising message to show at which moment to every person who turns on a computer, cell phone or—eventually—a television. . . . The goal is to transform advertising from mass messages and 30-second commercials that people chat about around the water cooler into personalized messages for each potential customer,” according to the Times article by Louise Story.

Digitas already uses data from major search companies like Google and Yahoo plus customer data from advertisers to feed its models. The results indicate which ads will be pushed first, which ad the returning visitor will see, what is seen after a purchase, and more. The ads also take into account such things as the customer’s age, location, and past exposure.

Ultra-personal ads embedded in all of your digital media content, zeroing-in on what kind of car you drive, what you ordered for dinner last night, your upcoming anniversary, and things that might make you blush.

Will it be too creepy for some, inviting a backlash? Or seen as a value-added service and a smart move for savvy advertisers?

Will the successful business model be to outsource ad production to offshore factories—churning out not sneakers and T-shirts, but sneaker and T-shirt ads, “handcrafted” just for you?

And from the vantage point of MarketingExperiments, how best to measure success?

peg.d@marketingexperiments.com

If you have any of the latest versions of SKYPE installed on your computer you may have noticed a little feature that converts any phone number on any website you may be browsing into a clickable phone number. The way it works is that it actually inserts CSS into the web page you are looking at to convert the text into a clickable SKYPE phone number.

Is this having an effect on your marketing?

We don't really know, but one thing we do know... users that have this plugin will definitely notice ads that include phone numbers over ads that do not because of the extra emphasis given to the ad with the SKYPE code. Another interesting point is that when you click the number it does not go to the actual landing page on the systems we tested it with which leaves Google with lost click revenue and companies that will have a harder if not impossible time of tracking customers who call by clicking that link (unless they use a special phone number just for PPC ads). We are pointing out PPC but this goes for any site that displays phone numbers with html (it can't read text on images).

In a recent article over at Adotas, they take a hard look at how changes in algorithms at Google can have a painful impact on sites that depend on the giant search engine for organic search results.

And if you think this applies just to small companies, consider this passage from the Adotas article:

“Now that Google has changed its algorithm, many sites are seeing a backlash that cannot be ignored. Answers.com has reported traffic to have gone down about 28% and ascribes this to the changed Algorithm of the search giant. Having an average of 3 million visitors in June, the loss has been significant.”

We have seen a number of algorithm changes at Google over the last few years, and each time thousands of businesses online feel the pain.

A sudden loss in ranking can be particularly frustrating for companies which invest significantly in professional SEO help, only to find that investment flushed away by the next tweak over at Google.

The problem can be compounded for those companies which depend not only on Google for organic search listings, but also use AdWords to drive additional traffic.

As we have noticed through our own research, promoting a site through AdWords can also be vulnerable to changes in competition and gradual increases in cost per click.

An alien MBA might reasonable ask, “Are you nuts? Why put your business success in the hands of one or two channels over which you have no control?”

Good question. And there is no doubt that any company which depends too much on traffic through Google is putting itself in a very vulnerable position.

The rational answer always has to be that one should develop additional marketing channels and promotional strategies. You have to expand your sources of traffic and reduce your risks.

In a sense, the lure of “free” organic traffic through Google has made too many companies lazy.

It’s also likely that some online businesses have succeeded to date without any real marketing strategy as all. Some will have either lucked out or worked hard to get a substantial and regular flow of traffic through Google, and have simply never bothered to explore other channels.

These companies are the most vulnerable and, if they crash and burn, they will really have nobody to blame but themselves.

But for every company, large and small, it makes sense to do a traffic audit and determine whether or not their revenues are too dependent on Google, or on any other single channel.

If the answer is yes, then it’s time to think like an alien MBA and put things back into balance.

MarketingExperiments has always maintained that the display URL is a very important part of creating an effective ad. Our research over the years indicated that simply adding a www to the beginning of the display URL or capitalizing the words within the domain could increase click-through significantly. This brings up the question of “What is the optimal configuration for a display URL?”—especially when the domain name itself has no direct relevance to the search term.

Over the last month, we have been conducting an experiment to determine the answer to that question. We launched a test utilizing a couple of our research partners that contained three URL variations:

www.DomainName.com
Keyword.DomainName.com
www.DomainName.com/Keyword

Our results thus far have been very interesting. One of our researchers contended that “www.domainname.com” is what people expect to see. Any variation from that is unexpected and raises a small question in people’s minds,” and with one of our research partners, he appears to be spot on.

With that particular partner, utilizing a sub-domain resulted in an 18% decrease in click-through rate. Using an extension appeared to have marginal effect, resulting in a very similar—though slightly lower—CTR as the original display URL of “www.DomainName.com.”

Question answered, right? Wrong. Checking the results of our other test subjects produced the opposite results! The regular domain performed slightly worse than the extension while the sub-domain outperformed it by 15%!

We are now in the process of expanding the test and trying to determine why these results varied. Was it the subject matter? Why did the tests create or reduce friction and is it something inherent in the format or did we make an unfortunate choice in keywords? Hopefully we’ll have enough data to give you the answers in the next couple of months.

As an aside, displays URLs are just one part of PPC. It’s important that you gain a full understanding of the various elements of PPC ad copy writing. If you are planning on attending Search Engine Strategies in San Jose this year will have several sessions showing you how best to tackle the puzzle of effective ad copy head on. MEC subscribers can save an additional 10% when with our exclusive priority code, 10MEC.
To learn more, visit www.SESSanJose.com.

* SES conferences usually focus on all search-related promotions, revealing all the innovative marketing approaches and tactics used to reach your customers. Listen to “success stories” and the best practices from SEM/SEO industry leaders, experts, and the search engines themselves.