Case Study: The Effective Use of Geo-Data for Search Marketing

(SEM & SEO)

An Introduction to Nestoria

• A leading residential real estate vertical search engine– 7 years expertise across 8 countries (UK, France, Germany,

Italy, Spain, Australia, India & Brazil)– 3 million unique users each month– 10+ million properties advertised and indexed each month

• Commercial agreements in place with over 80 of the World’s leading real estate portals – Property listings are aggregated and de-duplicated to

provide an optimal user experience– Driving clicks to listings on portals on a CPC basis

• CPCs significantly below those available directly on Search Engines

Clients: Property Portals who trust Nestoria

Nestoria’s Challenge

• Users typically find Nestoria when searching on Google or Bing for property to buy or rent using very geo-specific terms:– E.g. ‘Flat for sale near Tooley Street, SE1’

• The residential property market is very competitive and CPCs are high– Property portals, estate agents, classified ads & other vertical search engines

compete for search positions– Getting the wrong clicks can waste a lot of money!

• Effective local search marketing needs accurate and regularly updated geo-data for each catchment area broken down by street name, colloquial name, area, postcode, region etc. – In Europe data can be very expensive and often omits colloquial names– In Brazil and India, it is often not available or of poor quality and very expensive– In countries like Brazil and India, new built areas are often not on maps!

Some Peculiarities of Geo-Data

• Map data is often misleading as people:– Use colloquial names such as ‘Chinatown’ as opposed to ‘Gerrard Street’– Use old or local names after official names or geographic boundaries change– Get confused when a long road crosses several parts of a town or city

• E.g. is this street in Shoreditch, Hoxton or Hackney?– Misspell or mis-type names

• E.g. ‘Bermondsey Street’ vs ‘Bermonsey Street’ vs ‘Burmondsey Street’

• Local search habits vary by country and region– Post codes may not be exact : in some countries users search according to

proximity to a landmark or station • Do you know which addresses belong to which catchment area?• Geo-IP solutions only capture searchers near the searched for place not those

searching for that place but from another location• Studying analytics or customer data tells you only the customers that found

you, not those who found your competitor!

So what did Nestoria do?

• Developed proprietary geo-coding technology to extract geo-data from Open Street Maps overlaying additional data sources to improve targeting and data quality:– Accessing large volumes of accurate regularly updated geo-data– Not subject to rate limits and overage fees!

• Used this geo-data to conduct targeted search marketing at scale across 8 markets combining:– Nestoria’s expertise and understanding of how people conduct local searches in each

geographic location – Its ability to extract colloquial names and mis-spellings– Google and Bing API expertise to create hundreds of thousands of geo-targeted

keywords and Ads – Automated bid management to control costs

• Targeted large numbers of less competitive ‘long tail’ searches that individually bring few clicks but together bring a lot of cheap clicks

• Created geo-targeted landing pages for SEO

The results

• As a result Nestoria was able to:– Build a market leading presence across 8 markets

• Greatly increasing click volumes and reducing average CPCs• Target long tail searches including for colloquial names and

mis-spellings rather than simply using official place names (e.g. place names from the Royal Mail Address File)

– Build a strong market presence in India and Brazil despite the difficulty in obtaining good geo-data

– Reduce dependence on high cost and rate limited geo-data sources

HOW TO SUPER-CHARGE YOUR LOCAL SEARCH MARKETING

Your interest in Local Search Marketing• Lokku, the parent company of Nestoria, is now looking at ways to share its

expertise and technology• If any or all of these apply:

– You spend large sums on local search advertising, whether or not you have local branches or stores

– CPCs are high due to competition from other local search marketers– Reducing CPCs even by 10-15% could result in substantial cost savings– You find it hard to scale your local search marketing to hundreds of thousands of

keywords, including long tail keywords– To the extent that you use geo-data, you just use basic data like store addresses,

postcodes, cities or official place names – You do not have easy access to all local place names including colloquial names in

your catchment area• Then Lokku’s technology and expertise in local search marketing across 8

countries could benefit you

What does Lokku Offer?

• With 7 years expertise in Geo-locational marketing across 8 countries Lokku– Knows how people search for location based services across 8 countries– Understands all the issues around colloquial names, misspellings,

duplicate place names – Knows how to use this information to do effective, high-volume search

advertising and optimisation– Is an expert in using open geo-data sources like OpenStreetMap,

geonames, etc. – Is expert in using Google and Bing APIs to automate the creation of large

volumes of geo-localised ad copies and manage these profitably– Knows how to target long tail searches by appending geo-localised data

to keywords on a large scale

If you would like to discuss how Lokku could provide you with accurate, affordable geo-data for SEM &

SEO campaigns contact us at:Email: geosearch@lokku.com