Reach Local

[wisejm]

Hi, I've been looking at a company called Reach Local and wonder if anyone has any experience of working with them.

I'm concerned that, whilst they may return good results, their reach or ability to generate volume is limited. Also, how do the search engines view the fact that they "mirror" the actual web-page? Thanks in advance

[frankeverson]

The problem with reach local is that you do not know what keywords work for you. They complie a secret formula of words. I mean you can see what they are you just can not see which words work the best for you.

[dotTim]

If they (ReachLocal) provided an Excel file of historical data when you leave (showing keywords, CPC, clicks, CTR, etc.) or cancel your campaign, then I don't see the problem of not knowing what keywords they are bidding on and the CPC. Really, that's why you outsourced in the first place. I would rather be more concerned with product line performance (or however I structured my campaigns) with ReachLocal, rather than the keywords.

They're "mirroring" of your site is for Click-to-Call purposes, among the other data collection tasks. A toll-free number is generated from your HTML code and call time is measured; which is nice if you're customers are the "go to the phone" type customers and you are a stellar over-the-phone seller.

I wouldn't recommend their services unless you were planning on a monthly spend of over $1,000 - you won't see much return on $100, $200, etc. But, a sweet setup would be to get some clients (like doctors, professionals, etc.) that need to drive local sales via the Internet, and use ReachLocal's service and you get a 10% cut on their campaign spend, I think.

[bengerstein]

I've tested Reach Local out since January and was not happy with it. It was fairly easy and quick to implement and it was great being able to forward reports on to clients in the way of email.

The problem was:

1) there was no private label branding for agencies at time of testing

2) each report sent out included a link to their affiliate program / agency program / advertising program which if clicked clients would see you do practically nothing and get paid off their accounts, whereas they can do exactly the same thing and save 12.5%.

3) structuring campaigns in ReachLocal is far different than structuring campaigns inside the partner platforms (google, yahoo, etc.). For example, in Adwords you create a campaign with a certain theme and then create several ad groups that include 2 seperate ads (a/b) with different themes / ad copy and different groups of keywords. It doesn't work that way in ReachLocal. With Reachlocal you are basically given 1 account 1 campaign 1 ad group 1 ad max, and all your keywords are included in this one ad group. If you have keywords going after Product Line X and Product Line Y, and want to create seperate ad groups for each and different ads to test copy or offers, you're out of luck. What you'll have to do is create another account for Product Line Y, and be stuck with 1 campaign, 1 adgroup, 1 ad etc. For each ad group you want to create you'll have to create a new account.

4) Whatever keywords you provide them with, they will expand into thousands of completetly irrelevant keywords to generate a high volume of clicks - not necessarily focus on highly targeted, relevant keywords on your most profitable products / services.

5) They focus only on broad matching, and in general very broad single word terms.

6) Targeting ability: They limit you to 10 cities, a state, a region, or nationwide. You cannot do miles around an address, draw a targeted map, or anything else useful. If you want to target more cities you have to create another account - but this creates a problem with two accounts / campaigns using the same keyword list.

7) They do not share their keyword lists with you to determine results on a keyword level to make optimizations

8) They set increadibly high max bids to be in the #1 position only and cost [ i had some campaigns with an average CPC of $7 + ] There's so many other situations, that's I'm getting tired of writing about this.

The bottom line is if you're looking for a quick and easy solution for accounts spending below $3,000 / mo(mom & pops, doctors, etc) and have no concern for the bottom line then it's an excellent solution. Especially if you don't want to deal with the setup and ongoing optimization of the campaigns.

But if you'd like to see some accountability in your campaigns, my tip would be to manage it yourself and charge the client a reasonable fee. It may take just a little bit longer, but you'll experience a tremendous cost savings for your clients, and experience a substanstial increase in results and conversions. To address call tracking issues, anyone can get a line from the phone company for 20 bux a month and track it. Or for a web based solution, you can use RingCentral.com to track call conversions for small accounts (its $10-15 a month and has a lot of additional features). For larger accounts, Who's Calling / ClickPath.com is the best solution on the market, in my opinion. My enterprise clients can't get enough of this service for call & conversion tracking, ppc & organic optimization, client CRM, sales training and so on.

In my experience with ReachLocal, my clients and I were very upset with the results we received and when handled manually, we saw a 90% decrease in costs, a significant jump in positioning, double the amount of clicks, and huge ROI. With Reachlocal, we were wasting money, getting few clicks, and no sales. We also got a significant amount of traffic from outside the state and country we were targeting (when analyzing analytics)

Perhaps somebody had a better experience with ReachLocal and can comment on it. I also spoke to a company named LocalLaunch who provides a similar service for local advertisers, but you need a large client base to attempt it and they have actual people personally managing the campaigns, as opposed to software - or so they say. And it comes in at a much higher price point.

[bwade]

just a thought, but another alternative for you may be superpages.com. they drive a lot of the local listings for the search engines and power the yellow pages for several other large sites - msn.com, lycos.com, etc. they do have an sem/agency group that is dedicated to servicing agencies I would recommend. they have ppc, pfc and cpm products. they do have the ability to target multiple local and regional locations as well as multiple states and even nationwide. their user interface can be accessed by either the agency or the client and reports can be run based on the campaign, category, and/or geo. good luck with your search

[jmink]

To clear up a few things from a post on this thread (to the extent that I am able):

1) there was no private label branding for agencies at time of testing

Simply not true - the partner (CMRs and agencies) model is a key component of ReachLocal's business plan.

4) Whatever keywords you provide them with, they will expand into thousands of completetly irrelevant keywords to generate a high volume of clicks - not necessarily focus on highly targeted, relevant keywords on your most profitable products / services.

The ReachLocal platform starts each campaign with a taxonomy of business categories; once the campaign begins to optimize the platform automatically makes bid adjustments based on which keywords are driving ROI via conversion events (not clicks)...more on this later.

6) Targeting ability: They limit you to 10 cities, a state, a region, or nationwide. You cannot do miles around an address, draw a targeted map, or anything else useful. If you want to target more cities you have to create another account - but this creates a problem with two accounts / campaigns using the same keyword list.

Simply not true - ReachLocal campaigns can IP target within 10, 25, and 50 mile radius' from any address, or target a DMA.

8) They set increadibly high max bids to be in the #1 position only and cost [ i had some campaigns with an average CPC of $7 + ] There's so many other situations, that's I'm getting tired of writing about this.

False. The platform doesn't care about position and CPC is of secondary concern - the technology uses portfolio based (as opposed to key word rules) optimization (utilizing regression analysis and yield scenarios) and makes bid adjustments based upon the key words , position of key words, and search engines that are driving conversions (phone calls, emails, form submits) at the lowest cost possible. Many times campaign CPC goes up as the campaign optimizes, but cost per lead and cost per acquisition decreases.

ReachLocal is designed for businesses who sell offline, and the platform is designed to optimize based upon conversions, not clicks. Clicks are meaningless to a business that sells its goods or services offline. RL consults with it's clients to set up local landing pages (which convert at about 4X the rate than a main national page) so that customers don't drop off via the "find a location" maze.

[bengerstein]

My post was referring from my personal experience with the application in Jan 2006. Currently, it seems like the challenges have been corrected and upgrades have been made, making it more appealing to advertisers. But at the time of testing, it was not ideal to myself or the client.

For those that are looking for an alternative, there are new tools emerging that make managing multiple campaigns much easier, and are free.

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[alleynik]

My personal experience has also not been good with Reach Local. My company started doing business with Reach Local in 2005. Before we started using Reach Local, we ran our own campaigns and charged the client/business a monthly management fee. We had a 91% retention rate.

Since moving clients and adding clients to Reach Local, our retention rate dropped to 31%. Most of our clients were small businesses in a local area with a $1500 or lower monthly budget. We noticed a major increase in CPC (40-70%) and significant drop in clicks from the campaigns/clients we moved over - so we immediately had to move them back. We also noticed a significant drop in leads and ROI.

Right now we only have 5-6 Reach Local campaigns running - when they leave - we will no longer do business with Reach Local.

Support has gone down-hill. When we first signed up - support issues/phone calls/e-mails were all responded to within 24 hours. Since December 2006, I have had 3 support issues. I had to e-mail support at least 2 times on all 3 issues and I did not receive a response in 5 days plus on all 3 suppot issues.

Personally, I think any company should respond within 48-72 hours to any issue.

[berger997]

I have had a far different experience with reach local.

And not to be insulting but it is easy to tell who on this list is a pro and who is not. If you are using Reach Local and not just trying to "peddle your wears" you should know their tracking is based on reverse proxy....anyone worth their salt in IT knows that this does not produce a COPY of a site....it is dynamically served...that is proxy by definition. Your ability to measure ROI therefore in my opinion, even run a campaign is suspect.

My clients do not care about Clicks, leads budgets etc. They care about Acquisition. They want more business. We have been able to generate Dollar for Dollar an equal or better amount of business for our clients using reach local while eliminating our need to spend dozens of hours per month on campaign optimization.

Those who care to white label simply want to take credit and money for doing no work. The reason they are not receiving an ROI is because you are marking up a marked up product which is why Reach Local has gone to a direct sales force. I personally concentrate on design and do not mark up my clients Reach Local. I instead concentrate on regular refinement of their site to increase conversions that occur through Reach Local traffic.

I found that I can make more money doing this by billing for design and increased results which offer my client an actual service and require less manpower making my ROI far better. The margins are slim due to the free market economics in PPC...you're fattening them up unnecessarily.

The technology is absolutely amazing when utilized properly. It is designed for the purpose of driving local searchers into local business. If the account administrator (i.e. you and I) set up priorities incorrectly then their software will not perform up to its full capabilities. To use this for complicated e-commerce etc is simply foolish as it not intended for this use. The software platform is designed to be used for local business who have little or no internet savvy. It is designed to generate contact with those businesses. For a highly local business this works very well.

Currently I place many of my design clients on the platform as I deal mainly with health professionals, local retail, local Big box retail and professional services. All have expensive keywords. After 6 months of hard data comparison same site to same site one "hand optimized" the other on reach local. Reach local beat us 34 out of 36 times....the other two were within 5% ROI. Also average CPC on their system overall for our campaigns was $1.38 our "hand optimized" CPC was $1.31. Who cares? My ROI was far better as I now had more time to do lots of other revenue generating activities instead of the hours I spent manually running 36 campaigns.

Reach Local also produced a better ROI for these clients. For their dollar more measured contact was generated and they earned more business. Dollar for dollar you must compare ROI to ROI forget CPC. It simply doesn't matter. As JMINK stated CPC is irrelevant if a system is not set up to generate clicks. This system is set up to generate CONTACT and SALES for off line businesses. Often these words will be more expensive, require higher position etc.

You will serve your client better by spending your time on natural Optimization and refining for conversions. Leave the PPC up to professionals.

I have a degree in ME and took many statistics classes. We hand optimized accounts based on statistical analysis....the ability to have an algorithm provide this analysis is invaluable.

We track their specific customers through analytics and they are a higher quality prospect who does tend to purchase more frequently.

Sorry for the crass nature but there are too many people out there slinging mud on honest hard working people like myself who still look out for my clients best interest and not to find ways to bill more for less work.

[tjphilly1969]

Does PPC really make a significant impact for small and mid companies in the local marketplace or is the drive for PPC being driven by the ones that sell it and make a profit from it?

I instruct my clients to hire a part-time college intern to blog and register their business for every free directory listing they can find and simply build a high quality web site.

Placement at the top of the organic search is just as valuable as paid placement and the ROI is much higher.

I see PPC as a lazy developers answer to optimization in what is for the most part an uncompetitive marketplace for well developed sites.

[grooveroom]

I appreciate your thoughts on interns trying to assist and the focus on SEO but to give you an analogy, would you let the person who built your home sell your home? (Realtor vs. Home Builder). If those ads were not significant then why did Google pull almost $4B last quarter? Why were there 8,000 searches for "Dallas Florist" or 6,000 searches for "DUI Attorney" in Austin?

You cannot optimize a site for over 1,000 keywords and if you could, Google would catch the thousands of businesses doing it and change their algorythm.

Organic search FAR outweighs paid search but there are ZERO guarantees you will always be there.

[gail k]

Thank you, bwade, for the vote of confidence. I work for Idearc Media who created superpages.com and we bought the sem company in 2006-that company has the technology that produces search results for google, yahoo, msn, and many others. If you are interested in the details of how it works, I have a great white paper on the subject that I can email to you. Plus, we don't tack on to the price per click like so many others-there is only a flat fee for management.

[amflores]

Gail,

I am a rep with Reach Local and I can tell you that Berger and Jmink are pretty accurate with their posts. Clarity is key with anything that we do, especially when when a companies name is out there on a public forum. I think you will find our technology to be one of the most efficient form of Internet advertising you will find. I say this because of our reverse proxy system and conversion based optimization that we employ. We are one of the only companies that I am aware of that can determine which keywords are generating phone calls. Our Reverse Proxy makes our campaigns run extremely efficient and will eventually eliminate the keywords that are not converting, and keep the ones that are via conversion based optimization.

If you would like to learn more, you can PM and we will get you definitive information.

[jmandoo]

From reading these posts I really feel like I got royally screwed by going with Reach Local.

I had been managing my Campaigns on Google, and decided to let them have a run with it so I can get on the other search engines, MSN, Yahoo...etc....

I have been doing pretty well with google, and was very nervous to hand them money.

It looks like my fears are going to become reality, my card has just been charged and I am waiting to see results.

I should have done more research.

The reason I am nervous is because:

My product is a national one where an item is purchased on the site, I want those conversions, I do not want phone calls.

I am not the local dentists or Lawyer waiting for the phone to ring.

And I worry that they will tear through the money I gave them by paying huge amounts on CPC, and I will not make sales before the money is ripped through.

You guys are experts, am I being a nervous Nancy, or do you agree that I got suckered into buying a product that was not good for me.

At this point I am HIGHLY skeptical but would love to be wrong about them.

[amflores]

Jmandoo,

We also track your site and shopping cart submissions.Please work closely with your rep so you guys can tweak your campaign as time goes by. You are only using your budget when it is already working. Your rep will provide you with a login so you can monitor your campaign, and if need be, make changes. You are going to do just fine.

[Stugots315]

Your getting pumped full of information by Reachlocal employees and solicited by one Verizon sales rep. What you need is a customized PPC solution for your business from a company that can treat your account as a priority.

I'm hesitant to post anymore information here as this thread seems to be more of a solicitation thread then anything, if you want to contact me directly please feel free to PM me and we can talk about PPC on various levels.

[jmandoo]

Ya that is what I need to do as I do not have a a login from the rep.

errr..........

[Stugots315]

Defiantly start with the login information, remember everything in orange is clickable and be sure to check out your top keywords they are reporting for you.

[jmandoo]

The information is limited, very limited at best. This is not a service that somebody who is really on the ball with adwords should use.

this is maybe a good idea for somebody who knows nothing about adwords and wants some basic work to be done.

[Stugots315]

Ya thats by design, they do not want you to have the keys to the kingdom so to speak, they are afraid that if they give you all the info that you will go do it on your own.

You should be looking at an SEM firm that is going to be doing a/b testing, conversion tracking for your ecommerce, cart abandonment rates, ad variation, basically everything that a true SEM company will give you. Reachlocal is really for a small business owner that does not have very complex needs, the product works well in those applications.

[amflores]

Jmandoo,

I'm curious... What type of metrics are you interested in knowing? You can always run google analytics in conjunction with our metrics.

[gdgonzal]

I've read through a few of these posts and feel compelled to state our firm’s experience with Reach Local. Rather than force the reader to review this entire posting let me start by getting to the bottom line, I would not recommend Reach Local for anyone wishing to generate sales leads or actual revenue.

Our initial thought was to outsource our PPC campaign; we felt this wasn't our core competency and Reach Local would do a better job than we had. We did our standard due diligence for any 3rd party supplier and also interviewed their representatives in our office asking questions like:

Question: Could Reach Local’s reverse proxy support replicating SSL encryption?
Answer: Yes, that’s not a problem.
Reality: It took almost 2 months before this issue was resolved; ultimately Reach Local accomplished this task by using their own certificate to support the proxied SSL page.

Question: Would Reach Local be doing anything to negatively affect our hard earned organic PR?
Answer: No, Reach Local will not have any affect on page ranking.
Reality: Reach Local submitted their proxy site to Yahoo and our original site’s ranking dropped from #2 to #50 and I have spent a considerable amount of time getting us back on the first page at #8 and made Reach Local retract their proxy. Why they would even think to submit their proxied site to populate the organic section of any search engine still remains inexplicable to us.

Question: How many leads should we expect to reasonably get?
Answer: Reach Local presented us with a projection which stated we should expect to receive a minimum of 40 leads which could be directly attributed to them using their tracking tool. This was based on their market analysis with others offering similar services.
Reality: The first month Reach Local took over the campaign we received two leads neither of which was viable because Reach Local failed to implement the initial key words we had requested (see below). Moreover historically we could depend on 5 revenue generating leads from our web site and this all dried up as soon as Reach Local began to mismanage our campaign. The result was several phone calls and face-to-face meetings with our Reach Local representative to get us back on the right path 2 1/2 months into our 4 month campaign. We attempted to hold Reach Local accountable for the expectation they had set of 40 leads but were ultimately told by their representative these weren’t “real numbers” and if that was our expectation we should consider terminating the relationship, which we would have done except that this also meant abandoning our contractually obligated funding.

Question: Could we provide them with initial key words to avoid/facilitate their algorithms learning curve?
Answer: Absolutely, just e-mail those to us.
Reality: Two months after Reach Local took over the campaign their representative admitted that he failed to follow through on our request and never implemented our baseline keywords. He could not offer any explanation as to why this had occurred stating only that he was “sorry”.

At the end of the day our expectations went from expecting to see new revenue to desperately trying to maintain the original status quo. It was so bad that we just wanted our traffic to be what it was before Reach Local took over our campaign. What was more disturbing was our Reach Local account rep’s attempt to blame the poor performance on our website. This poorly thought through logic crumbled when we pointed out that it was a little late in the game to point to perceived deficiencies with our website. These concerns should have been mentioned before Reach Local set the expectation of 40 leads. Also, our website was already generating 5 leads per month so how can anyone reconcile this ludicrous statement…at minimum this should have been maintained not driven into the negative.

Suffice it to say we will not be renewing our contract with Reach Local. We’re going to shift our focus to organic and maintain our own PPC campaign…turns out; by comparison, we were the experts after all. I have a local guy that does reasonably priced SEO…we’re going to set an implementation plan in place to reach short terms goals ultimately culminating in something long term. We re-learned a hard lesson…in business there are no easy shortcuts. These guys sold us “magic beans”, do yourself a favor and don’t fall into the same trap. The real shame of it is that I still believe their technologies to be viable, but their support and representative have no clue whatsoever. At the end of the day technology is just an enabler; if your people aren’t competent then I don’t care how great your systems are.

[Stugots315]

Your points are dead on, I had a very similar experience. They claim to be the leaders in the industry but when you start asking some really technical questions they fold like a cheap tent. Your points are dead on, I would be very interested in hearing anyone from reachlocal try to rebut your post at the very least it would be entertaining.

[SEM&YellowPageGuru]

I have my thoughts on outsourcing SEM........

Although I respect and believe that SEM firms typically have a clients best interest at heart, I believe you should consider the following points when oursourcing your local paid search:

-A company that offers natural as well as paid opportunity, not just domain proxy w/ paid search.
-Transparency in costs per click down to the individual keyword/click.
-Geo targeting of ads as well as negative keyword insertion in ad campaigns (ex: Arlington..... Arlington Tx vs Arlington VA, using VA as a negative keyword for clients focusing on Texas as well as GEO tarketing)
-No click upcharges (pay market price for all clicks) -remove the incentive to provide more clicks by focusing on conversion rates instead of CTR's.
-Ability to include clients in IYP's that offer better conversion rates than traditional search engines.
-Human editing..... routine meetings with clients to discuss goals, results, and optimization of your paid search portfolio vs a computer generated system.

Regardless of what a client decides to do, outsourcing SEM is a very wise decision for most SMEs.

Although the above suggestions are things the company I work for provide, I feel they are key components to the best SEM ROI.

Unfortunately most SEM firm sales reps are about as qualified at creating campaigns as patented computer systems and software. You really need the human touch and not a sales rep plugging data into a system. The campaign setup is only 50% of the equation... the other 50% is important and that takes place after the ads are up for 30-60 days. ;)

[milkbar]

jmink - I would be very interested in speacking to you about your services for my company. Please let me know how to contact you. Thanks

[rapidvectorseo]

If a person really does not know which keywords are doing well for his/her website and a which strategy company is using for their website than i must say Real local is the worst choice. As client providing budget so he should be aware what is happening out there with website.

[extrapane]

I just had a ReachLocal sales pitch and came out of it still wondering if they can help me. My understanding is that they have two primary services for my type of very small business that lives and dies by phone contact: caller tracking and ad optimization.

Although ReachLocal is geared toward optimizing phone contacts, I think that my handling of phone calls may be more effective for my business. When I get a call, I use the caller ID to do a reverse lookup. This tells me the registered name and address of the caller while I chat with them. I then use the name and address to look them up on the real-estate tax rolls for their county. This two-part process takes about 20 seconds. My customers need to be home owners, so this process qualifies the prospect. I always ask them how they found me, which provides the keywords that worked for them along with a story or two about all the searching that didn't work - very helpful. I also hear about YellowPages, direct mail, etc. By the end of the call, they're in my database and we have next steps planned.

The second issue is ad optimization. Right now I'm running about 900 keywords across four campaigns, six ad groups and twenty ads. I use very targeted geograhic areas employing AdWords' custom mapping. So far, only 8% of my calls are unqualified prospects (I have learned that some people call the number before they read the ad). Based on what I'm reading in this forum, ReachLocal may not be able to give me that level of ad/geographical granularity within my $1000 monthly budget. I would appreciate any more feedback on this issue as it applies to my case.

[SEM&YellowPageGuru]

ReachLocal no longer has a leg to stand on.


They had 2 services that really made it stand apart from the competition: Proxy sites and recorded call technology.

What they are missing:

- Service that extends beyond Google and Yahoo, such as Superpages.com, Switchboard.com, and other directory sites not just the major search engines.

- Hands on Service and not just a sales rep that gets paid residual income on clicks to plug information into a computer system

- Transparent reporting on the true cost of a click on Google and Yahoo.....

I think of only 1 company that offers the 3 distinctive advantages above.

<----------------------------:p

I met with a client yesterday who has ReachLocal managing his SEM. Long story short he was pissed after I showed him his #2 page rank on Yahoo organic using the ReachLocal proxy site...... it wasnt even PPC! They could have taken the 30 minutes at his office to do the basic SEO that I did just by logging in the site and working on the sites page properties and other information such as meta-tags and keyword density etc.

Nope... all you get is paid search! Wooot woot.....

Local search is:

PPC
SEO
IYP/Map based search

not just PPC!