Local-mobile ad network xAd released its latest quarterly report containing data from its own network on mobile ad performance. The report drills down on the travel category to show engagement rates for search, display and calls.

First, here are the general metrics across the xAd network for Q1 2012:

Average display CTRs were .72%. That number is significantly higher than PC display, which is 0.09% on average (although there’s considerable debate above the value of the “CTR” metric for display). The larger point is that interaction with display ads on mobile is much higher than on the PC.

Search clicks are also much higher in mobile than online. Indeed, the numbers above beat mobile CTRs for major search engines (i.e., Google), which are just above 4%. The xAd numbers are twice that.

The data above also show that 58% of post-search actions were calls. But look at the secondary action rates in the travel category. They indicate the urgency or the immediacy of the consumer need in question.

These calls and map lookups indicate a high propensity to convert. The numbers are dramatic.

The following were the top local-search categories on the xAd network:

In travel, the top search keywords were:

1. Car Rental
2. Travel Agencies
3. Limousine Services
4. Airline
5. Tours
6. Transportation Services
7. Rentals
8. Resorts
9. Cruises
10. Amusement Parks

These keywords indicate people at all phases of the “purchase cycle.” Some are in travel planning mode and some would appear to have more immediate needs (direct response) — e.g., “car rental.”

There are additional data in the report; I’ve just pulled out a few highlights.

Next Wednesday at 1pm Eastern/10 Pacific Monica Ho of xAd and I are doing a free webinar examining local-mobile advertising and where it stands today. As you know there’s a ton of hype around LBS and local-mobile ads.

Some have argued that local-mobile ads represent 50% of all mobile advertising today. However the actual number is much closer to 25% or less. Why? Because there are still many barriers on the display side to realizing the potential of location-targeted ads on mobile devices.

The webinar comes out of a report Opus Research just published called “Finding the ‘L’ Spot: The Importance of Localization to Mobile Ad Performance.” As part of the report, we did an ad buy across five mobile ad networks to the compare performance of an identical hotel campaign and test the thesis that local networks should outperform national networks.

The results of that study will be presented as part of the webinar. Attendees will also get a copy of the report for free. But you need to sign up and attend to receive the report. In addition xAd will be presenting some best practices advice for mobile marketers. There will be lots of terrific content, data and conversation.

Join us on Wednesday May 23, at 1pm Eastern. It’s free but to attend you must register.

A report in the 9to5Mac blog says that “trusted sources” indicate that with iOS 6 (presumably coming later this year) Apple will replace Google Maps on the iPhone with its own mapping product. That product will be the result of several acquisitions and outside hires.

This has been a slow train coming down the track for a couple of years now. I’ll be interested to see what the new Apple maps (assuming the rumor is correct) look like and whether they match most of the functionality that Google Maps for Android offers — including most importantly navigation.

You can read more from my article for Marketing Land.

But what do you think about this? How successful do you think an Apple Maps would be and do you think iOS users would be jarred by the change?

ComScore today estimated Q1 e-commerce spending in the US to be just over $44 billion. That large figure was down from Q4 2011 but up 17% from a year ago. Below are revenue numbers from comScore’s e-commerce tracking since 2009:

The US Commerce Department’s most recent e-commerce figures (Q4 2011) show that online spending remains a tiny fraction of overall US retail at less than 5%. The real story, however, is that a growing percentage of the $1 trillion in quarterly retail spending is influenced by digital media (online and mobile). As one obvious example, a large majority of smartphone owners in the US say that they access the Internet in stores now as part of their shopping process.

YP Holdings (“YP”), the new entity combining the assets of AT&T Ad Solutions and AT&T Interactive, launched today as a separate company. Majority owned by private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management, AT&T retains a significant minority stake (47%).

Facts and data from the press release:

• YP had $3.3 billion in revenues in 2011.
• 30% of 2011 revenues (nearly $1 billion) “derived from its digital and mobile platforms, making YP the ninth-largest digital media company of any type in the US”
• 700,000 local advertisers throughout the country
• YP.com and YP Mobile have 38 million monthly uniques
• YP Local Ad Network sees 70+ million monthly uniques
• YP’s Real Yellow Pages directories used “more than 5 million times daily by consumers to seek out local businesses”
• The new company will be headquartered in Tucker, Georgia and led by AT&T Interactive CEO David Krantz

What’s your view of the outlook for the new company?

The “purchase funnel” has always been something of a fiction or perhaps it’s better described as a theory. It has been a helpful way for marketers to organize their thinking about how consumers make buying decisions and how to target them accordingly. Yet actual consumer behavior has always been more complex and labyrinthine.

I had a conversation earlier this week with Walt Doyle, the former CEO of WHERE and now the head of PayPal’s Media Network. WHERE was acquired last year by eBay/PayPal. Doyle said the PayPal Media Network is dedicated to a truly multi-channel approach to consumer marketing and shopping.

As Doyle said in his post announcing the re-branding of Where Ads as the PayPal Media Network:

A consumer may begin their purchase journey in a store, on a phone, at their desktop, or on a tablet, then engage with the same brand or product across a multitude of different mediums and devices to discover, research, price check, etc. . .  The boundaries between the physical and digital world have disappeared and the purchase funnel has become a purchase pretzel! No longer is there e-commerce, offline commerce, m-commerce – there is simply commerce.

From “funnel” to “pretzel”

Doyle described this “new” process to me as the “purchase pretzel,” which I thought was a great concept. The term is his (the graphic is mine) and it better expresses (at least metaphorically) the convoluted route that consumers now take to purchase.

Marketers have had a siloed approach to marketing and attribution in the past. They now have to think in much broader ways about how all their channels work together. Rather than valuing the “last click” or the last the touchpoint before consumer purchase they need to consider all the ways that consumers can or may have been influenced along the way to the POS. This means lots of tracking and careful thought about landing pages — especially in mobile.

Facebook has created a new “marketing classroom” directly at marketers and SMBs. The initiative is intended to demystify marketing on the site and bring more SMBs into the fold.

The learning center features case studies, how-to documentation and webinars. There’s one today at 12:30 ET: “An introduction to the four steps to business success.”

This will go some distance toward helping motivated SMBs learn how to use Facebook more effectively. And given that Facebook is one of the two or three big online brands SMBs are most focused on — the others being Google and perhaps Yelp — there’s reason to believe that this effort will be modestly effective.

The larger reality is that SMBs don’t want to become online marketing experts — period. With the exception of the outliers and the truly motivated, they mostly want to focus on their businesses and leave the marketing to third parties.

Over the past several days both Yellow Media (YPG) and SuperMedia posted Q1 results. SuperMedia revenues were $363 million, down 17% vs. a year ago. However company margins improved due to tighter expense management. Net income was up 107% compared with the same period last year.

Yellow Media took a $2.9 billion goodwill impairment charge, similar to what AT&T did in Q4 last year. Print declines largely were responsible for 17.3% lower revenues for the Canadian yellow pages publisher.

Yellow Media revenues were $289.1 million vs. $349.4 million in Q1 2011. Online revenues were $85.9 million vs. $83.2 million in 2011, growth of 3.2%.

Much like the newspaper industry it’s clear that online revenues are not compensating for losses in print revenue.

Originally a Mint-like financial site, Bundle reinvented itself earlier this year as a local business directory — with a twist. It’s rating businesses based on consumer purchase data that it aggregates through deals with credit card companies.

Bundle uses the anonymous credit-card data to determine popularity and loyalty. In other words, Bundle sees how many people spent money at XYZ restaurant or boutique. It can also tell whether those consumers returned to those businesses.

It thus has a clear measure of consumer loyalty (and presumably quality by extension). This system is an alternative to ratings, reviews, check-ins and “Likes” as indicators of quality and popularity. While a check-in is not necessarily an endorsement, Likes can be bought and reviews are subjective, purchase data is concrete and “objective” in a way these other categories are not.

I spoke at some length with CEO Jaidev Shergill and he told me that Bundle has data on some 2 million businesses, though not in all categories or geographic markets. Its coverage is expanding quickly through access to millions of local transactions. He stressed to me that the data are completely anonymous.

There are other interesting things that Bundle can do with the data. There are B2B merchant analytics and competitive benchmarking Bundle can provide. Bundle can also use the data to provide personalized consumer recommendations.

Shergill said that they know from the data that consumer X ate at restaurant Y but also spent money at shop Z. This allows Bundle to build Amazon-like recommendations (that are more refined) based on purchase history. People who shop here, eat there and so on.

It could thus create audience profiles, personas and segments and make recommendations based on the answers to a few key questions. Paradoxically these recommendations wouldn’t require any knowledge of users’ past behavior or activity.

Shergill is planning to license Bundle’s data to third parties, which can be used in a variety of ways. Most obviously it can be used as a complement or alternative to reviews. It can also be used to help improve search results in some cases.

It’s a fascinating model and one that is not easily duplicated because of the underlying financial data.

AT&T Interactive has enabled more detailed restaurant and menu search in its YP Mobile apps. This is based on the earlier incorporation of data from SinglePlatform. AT&T says that users can now search “13,000,000+ menu items from 300,000+ restaurants.”

One can now search for individual items such as “chicken tikka masala” or “creme brulee.” Restaurants is the top online and mobile search category for the publisher and generally in the local search market.

SinglePlatform’s data is not exclusive to AT&T but the latter hopes to stay a step ahead of competitors by offering a range of content and new capabilities built around that content.

The question is: does something like this make a difference to you and would it get you to change your behavior if you’re not a current YP Mobile app user?

Related post: Local Data 2.0: GigWalk vs. Locu vs. SinglePlatform