What can I expect?

Advertising Budget

If you have done any advertising, online or offline you already know that results vary widely and depend on several factors.  The two main factors that determine success are advertising budget and market competitiveness.  As with most advertising, the budget that you can allocate determines the amount of exposure you receive and therefore the response rate.  BridgeWorks suggests a starter budget of $250 per month to see measurable results.  The minimum budget is $100 per month which should garner 1-5 new clients each month.

Market Competiveness

The second factor is market competitiveness.  Odds are you already know the saturation level in your local area for your products and services.  As you compete at the street level for customers so must you compete for them online.  There are two forces at work online; product competitiveness and location competitiveness. 

Product Competitiveness relates to the product or service, and the amount of traffic, research and purchasing that occurs online for that product or service.  If you are selling iPods online and want to drive traffic to your local store to buy iPods you may find it difficult to generate any significant traffic from online advertising because the product competitiveness of advertising for iPods is extremely high.  Products that are fiercely competed for online equate to higher advertising costs.

Location Competitiveness is the amount of competition that a particular physical location sees.  This could be nationally, by state, by metro area, city, zip code or neighborhood. The larger the city or area the more competition you face. This translates into higher advertising costs. On the other hand you can get into trouble with "hyper-targeting" if you make your target area too narrow. There will be lower advertising costs associated with smaller geographic areas, but you may be pushing yourself out of the market because there is not a significant number of people doing searches in that area.  This is very obvious with an example. Let's imagine you have a pizza place in Ballard.  Click on the below links:

          pizza in seattle (Google)          pizza in seattle (Yahoo)

If  you run the search a number of times on both Google and Yahoo, results range between 4-8 advertisements and 8-9 advertisements, respectively (sponsored results are advertisements that appear along the right side, and sometimes the top, of the search results page).  What this means is that there is significant location competiveness on Yahoo and moderate competiveness on Google.  As you might imagine the level of competitiveness dictates the price.  The more listings for a particular search the higher the cost of the advertising.

Let’s contrast that search with more sophisticated and realistic approach.  The approach is more sophisticated because it lowers the overall cost of the advertising while at the same time makes more sense because it appropriately targets the customer’s real location.  Do another search on Google or Yahoo, but this time use this search term:

pizza in ballard (Google) pizza in ballard (Yahoo)

You get 0-1 sponsored results.  What this means is that there is no real location competitiveness for pizza places in Ballard, Washington.  (By the way, if you have a pizza place in Ballard, call us now!)  What Bridgeworks would do in this case is create multiple ads with multiple offers that would dominate all searches for pizza in Ballard. 

Destination Web Sites

One last thing to point out about the above search is the organic or natural results.  These are the results that appear on the left.  On Google you’ll notice that the majority of the listings come from destination city guide sites, like CitySearch and Yelp, or internet yellow page sites like SwitchBoard and YellowPages.com.  Yahoo does a better job with listing actual pizza establishments, but even so, the destination sites dominate the results.  What’s the point? 

The point is that if you wanted to guarantee advertising prominence you would have to advertise on all of these sites, not knowing which one is the right one, and then have to keep track of multiple deals and multiple outlets.  BridgeWorks eliminates this exercise by including you in those sites and owning the search in the first place, pizza in ballard.

• How does it work?
• How do I sign up?
• How long does it take to see results?