I had the opportunity to speak with Michael Pastko, CEO of Coupious a Boulder, Colorado-based mobile coupon platform. Coupious got its start when Pastko and his partner leveraged their experience at Purdue University to launch a Coupious iPhone application in Lafayette, Indiana. While the duo did very little marketing, word-of-mouth marketing helped push their mobile application to potential users. Push seems to be the operative word with Coupious since its model does not push coupons to people based on their geography, but rather allows people to seek on-demand the just-in-time promotional offers relevant to them when they want them and where they want them. Many of its initial customers utilize the platform to run multiple promotions or post “just-in-time” offers to get rid of seasonal items or to push specific menu items.

“In order to win over local businesses, the goal was to replicate the print coupon model to help make it familiar and comfortable to select,” says Pastko. However, unlike print coupons, mobile promotions on Coupious can track the number of impressions, what promotional offerings are performing better and most importantly where impressions are taking place. As Pastko points out, “being able to locate where people are downloading or viewing promotional offerings allows advertisers to understand if consumers are looking at the point of sale, responding to an outdoor billboard, or are in areas of town that might offer new potential for the business.”

While college towns in the Midwest have been a successful launching ground for Coupious, traditional media groups such as newspapers have become the major focus in the past 12 months. Pastko has been careful about his growth plans seeking markets where Coupious can gain a high density of coupons and promotional offerings. “One of the biggest success factors is having enough content to make the application useful. Just like directories, if the restaurants and entertainment venues people expect to see are not in the database of offerings, then people’s desire to use the application decreases significantly.” Coupious’ model is not to aggregate coupons or scrape the Web for other offers, but to deal directly with the advertisers in the market. Pastko is quick to point out that “this gives consumers confidence that this is a legitimate offer and will be honored locally.”

When asked if the recent surge in coupons is a trend born out of the slow economy, Pastko said “coupons and promotional offers are in a trend phase now but the space is going through a transformative revolution where offers will not simply be coupons but will become promotions embedded within key messages making them more relevant and highly geotargeted to the users location. The mobile platform is the ideal device to deliver just-in-time offers, reaching people where they are and when they have a specific need. It’s up to mobile coupon companies to continue to innovate and embed offers within other media to further increase adoption and usage.”

The Coupious application is currently available on the iPhone and Android platforms with work under way to broaden to other application platforms.

I had the opportunity to speak with Brad Reynolds, CEO of Mongoose Metrics, a Cleveland, Ohio-based call measurement and conversion analytics company. Reynolds was quick to point out that it is not simply a call tracking company, but rather it is dedicated to linking online and offline conversion so clients can better understand what leads to sales conversions. According to Reynolds, “Our business is based around illuminating the sales funnel related to offline conversions. Our goal is to make it easy to track online and offline conversions side-by-side. We want to drive actions like tweaking marketing spend and efforts with a full basket of information.”

While some companies focus entirely on online conversions, the reality, according to Mongoose Metrics, is that a large majority of transactions occur offline via the phone. In most cases there is a chain of events that lead to an offline conversion. By better understanding how online and offline media influence the conversion path, marketers have a better sense of what media and messages they should be using to maximize their effectiveness. With good offline and online conversion data in hand, brands can personalize their messages across media to create a conversation and a stronger relationship.

Mongoose Metrics has also been busy putting together an effective international local number tracking network and recently put together deals in Canada and the U.K. to deliver true local exchange numbers across both countries. Rather than relying on VoIP numbers or toll-free numbers, Mongoose is now able to offer local telephone numbers better linking businesses to their local area. “Until recently, it had been nearly impossible for Canadian and U.K. companies to use local phone numbers to follow visitors from Web-to-phone to understand how their Web sites drive phone calls and ultimately sales,” according to Reynolds. Mongoose Metrics’ move into the U.K. and Canada is a first step in expanding internationally.

When asked where call measurement is headed in the near term, Reynolds quickly pointed to mobile. “While many feel there will be transactions handled on the handset, the current reality is that most sites are not fully enabled for mobile screens, requiring too many clicks and too much scrolling. People want to get a quick answer to their question and often will revert to contacting the store or company since it is easier — and they have a phone in their hand to expedite the need for information. Click-to-call features makes sense on the mobile Web and will offer yet another layer in understanding where offline conversions are initiated.”

When asked about other developments, Reynolds replied, “Mongoose is currently working on a few proprietary products to provide deeper analytics of incoming calls and hopes to create a way to trigger specific actions tied to a recognized set of keywords. This is yet another step Mongoose is taking to help drive conversions and personalize the communication between consumers and advertisers.”

Zvents, the events lister, is reporting 35 percent year over year growth with over eight million unique visitors, largely due to its powering events for 285 local media brands, including  major newspapers and the NBC owned-and-operated TV stations.

CEO Ethan Stock cites Quantcast data showing Zvents Media Network as the 250^th most used net on the Web, ahead of Citysearch (#267) and Local.com (#291). “We’re a very large local property by any measure,” he says.

The company, which has raised $32 million over its five year history, also claims it has been averaging 12,000 monthly event listers. These use the site to promote a wide range of local events and activities, including live music, performing arts, sporting events and community activities.

Of those listers, roughly 1200, or 10 percent, are now boosting their presence by taking out ads via self–serve – a percentage that Stock thinks will climb to 20 percent in 2010. The company also sells regional and national accounts via telemarketing and national sales, with top categories including major concert promoters, sports teams, casinos and  home and garden events.

High end shopping, with its sales-oriented events, such as Williams Sonoma cooking demonstrations, are also becoming more important to Zvents bottom line.  “There is a significant segment of consumers who perceive shopping as entertainment,” says Stock.

The key to the company’s future in local, however, is to stay away from the trap of focusing on directory-type advertising. Instead, Zvents will stay focused on events and shopping, he says, which have the most highly motivated advertisers. “They are also relatively concentrated in terms of the volume of advertising.”

Indeed, the company’s focus on events and advertising puts it most in competition with social sites such as Facebook and Google, rather than local sites such as Citysearch and Yelp, who may be more directory oriented, says Stock. Other events oriented companies include Eventful, and “new city guide” players such as Center’d and American Towns.

In hindsight, the company’s initial focus on teaming with newspapers “look like a very smart choice,” adds Stock. While newspapers are commonly disparaged in today’s climate for their declining circulation and advertising, “they have high repeat traffic. Much more than national partners.” Top Zvents newspaper partners include SFGate, the Denver Post, Seattle PI, Boston.com, the Dallas Morning News, the Atlanta Journal Constitution, New York Daily News, and the Orange County Register.

Stock also sees a major boost coming from renewed efforts in local from national partners such as AT&T’s Yellowpages.com, which has been an investor in the company ; and from MSN, where Zvents listings will be showing up in Bing, and trigger Instant Answers via Silverlight search.

Sears is loath to invest in its physical stores but has built a collection of “shop your way” online and mobile services as a high margin substitute, according to an article on WSJ.com. The article notes that Sears’ e-commerce division boasts 180 employees, and has boosted its revenues by “double digits” in the past two years with products like MyGofer and Sears Marketplaces, earning $2.7 billion, or 6 percent of total company sales.

Sears Marketplace, similar to other marketplaces established by Amazon and eBay (and coming soon from Wal-Mart), collects commissions of 7 percent to 20 percent from retail partners. The division, however, recently lost Online President Jim Barr, who had been recruited in 2008 from Microsoft. Moreover, no mention is made of ServiceLive,  a ServiceMagic-like home-and-trade leads service launched in beta last year.

Three years ago, BIA/Kelsey created the Marketplaces research program and conference because we saw that local advertising was quickly “verticalizing.” Indeed, money and talent have poured in for the new breed of vertical products that would take their place among existing vertical success stories, such as AutoTrader, Cars.com, Realtor.com and ServiceMagic.

The Marketplaces 2010 conference reveals just how fast the industry has evolved. This year’s event, now under construction, is set to highlight all the major trends in Marketplaces, including:

• AOL’s $50 million investment in Patch.com, and ongoing transformation of its Mediaglow vertical properties (and Mapquest)
• eBay’s renewed efforts to build up classifieds as entry-level e-commerce via Kijiji, eBay Motors and other services
• Examiner.com’s  big bet on local/vertical content, and its network of 26,000 “examiners.”
• Groupon’s “smart mob” theory of local commerce, backed by a $32 million investment, that allows hundreds to make a volume purchase of local services and products.
• Redbeacon, AlikeList and others’ efforts to remake ServiceMagic-like home and trade leads with social media
• Adify and Pulse360’s  bid to verticalize ad networks for local merchants and national brands
• OpenTable’s big bet on mobile to let diners make reservations wherever they are.

The two-day conference takes full advantage of its location in sunny San Diego. It includes rich research presentations, top-flight demos of the latest services, and a preconference showcasing all the best tools of Marketplaces 2010. Come to San Diego March 22-24 to learn, enjoy the unbeatable networking and participate. You can register at early-bird rates here.

CONFIRMED SPEAKERS (in Alpha)

• Ethan Anderson, CEO, Redbeacon
• Jeff Beard, CEO, Localeze
• Rick Blair, CEO, Examiner.com
• Jon Brod, EVP, AOL*
• Craig Donato, CEO, Oodle
• Jim Delli Santi, CEO, AlikeList
• Todd Dubner, SVP, NCI
• Russ Fradin, CEO, Adify
• Krista Glotzbach, VP, Vast.com
• Mark Goldstein, Chairman, Loyalty Labs
• Martin Herbst, GM, Kijiji U.S., eBay
• Scott Jampol, Senior Director, Marketing, OpenTable
• Jaan Janes, CEO, Pulse 360
• David Kidder, CEO, Clickable
• Steve Larsen, CEO, CallSpark
• Andrew Mason, CEO, GroupOn*
• Colin Pape, CEO, ShopCity
• Ben Saren, CEO, CitySquares
• Craig Smith, President, ServiceMagic
• Mat Stover, CEO, Local Matters
• David Vazdauskas, President, Local Thunder

*keynote

CitySquares, an online city guide and directory company based in Boston, has acquired the assets of Yokel, which provides online retail services and maintains a database of 2 million retailers. Terms weren’t disclosed. The combination should work well with CitySquares’ recent turn toward national/local operations.

Fees for Yokel, whose tagline is “all shopping, all local,” start at $7.95 a month. Retailers using the service get a free storefront, assorted marketing tools, and listings on search engines and on Yokel’s own shopping directory. The site was started by Scott Randall, former CEO of FairMarket, an early eBay competitor that later focused on B2B retail auctions. Randall will work with CitySquares as a consultant.

According to The Boston Business Journal, CitySquares, which has some backing by Mark Cuban and Jonathan Kraft (i.e., the family behind Gillette), says it expects to be cash flow positive in 90 days and will be hiring again after weathering the tough climate of 2009.

Lately, we’ve been hearing more about  shopping search start-up Spreezio, a kind of Priceline for merchandise (TechCrunch profiles it today). In other words, you name the price that represents the threshold at which you’d buy, and then see who bites.

This could come at the right time as we’re seeing more services that give greater control to consumers to dictate pricing. Groupon is a quickly growing service that carries this general theme, and TechCrunch 50 winner Redbeacon lets consumers send job offers to local service providers.

As with the above examples, one challenge is that it can only be as good as the number of merchants that are using the system and responding to offers. So far, the company has reportedly signed up “over 100″ merchants including Macy’s and Best Buy.

The chain-centric approach isn’t surprising nor a new challenge in the local shopping space: inventory data providers such as Krillion and ShopLocal have each tackled the decidedly easier “single point of entry” that is national retailers.

Mid-market and SMB segments will continue to be a challenge, no matter how enticing an offering is.  Incidentally, it does seem to have some enticement as a lead source. Low barrier too; merchants pay Spreezio a percentage of conversions — something Krillion has indicated to be of interest to electronics retailers.

But another issue is that the differences in adoption among store managers could result in an uneven quality experience (will they manage it on an ongoing basis?). They’ll also be attracted based on usage, which in turn hinges on the quality/comprehensiveness for users … chicken and egg … blah, blah, blah.

On the other hand, it could be the right macroeconomic environment for this sort of offering to gain consumer traction. One wonders why it didn’t make a bigger splash six weeks ago. We’ll give it time to prove out.

Local product data provider Krillion announced a deal today that will distribute product ads and inventory content across Topix’s hyperlocal news network.

This will take the form of a geographically targeted “local best deals” section on many Topix pages. As Krillion’s data drills down to product feeds at individual store locations, these listings will promote in-stock merchandise at the closest stores. Geotargeting will happen based on the ZIP-code level segmentation that Topix employs, and ads will be contextually targeted as well.

“We’ve started by targeting ads in the technology section for each location,” Krillion CEO Joel Toledano told me today. “We want to target consumer electronics in certain categories where it is relevant content for users. In other categories we are going to place ads where they work best and we’ll do some a/b testing.”

Stepping back, this rounds out Krillion’s distribution strategy. At one end of the purchase funnel, it works with companies like Consumer Reports where the search parameters are location and product (involving specific intent and high conversions). Moving up the funnel, it works with directories such as Yellowpages.com, where it’s more of a browse use case with the parameters of location and retailer.

The Topix deal lands Krillion even higher up the funnel, says Toledano, where the parameter is primarily location. This involves Topix readers coming across product ads that are geographically relevant to their location. Because of the offline purchasing tendencies of consumer electronics and appliances (Krillion’s sweet spot), Toledano maintains that this localization causes ads to be more relevant to Topix readers.

“We fit well together,” says Toledano. “We have an index of products carried across U.S. cities and towns. This makes sense for Topix users reading articles about those areas. It’s bound to be more relevant than a random Netflix ad or University of Phoenix banner.”

The deal opens up this new form of advertising for Krillion with similar high-traffic content networks that are geographically segmented. This type of distribution nearer to the top of the funnel will represent a new area of growth, says Toledano, and we can expect to see more deals like it.

Krillion’s Localization Engine covers 40,000 U.S. retail locations including Home Depot, Sears, Target and Wal-Mart. Topix’s network covers 40,000 U.S. ZIP codes and claims 16 million unique visitors. The arrangement will involve a rev share between the two companies.

Krillion announced today that it will productize its “find in store” functionality into a more succinct package for product search sites to use. This will include easier integration into Web sites; an interface that puts product pricing, availability and reviews all in one window; and additional features such as recommended substitutes for out-of-stock products.

The company has specifically designed this with manufacturing sites in mind — which it claims make up the bulk of online product research destinations. Right now, however, manufacturers are dropping the ball by giving detailed product information but no information about where to find items locally (or how many are on the shelf).

This logic was behind Krillion’s recent partnership with Panasonic. At that time, CEO Joel Toledano told us he has his sights set on more manufacturer sites, given the above realities combined with data that show 55 percent of online shoppers prefer to pick up items locally. The new enhancements should help the company get there, and we’ll find out soon the manufacturers with which Toledano is talking.

Localeze biz dev head Gib Olander has a good piece in MediaPost in which he argues the need to refine local search marketing campaigns based on changing search behavior. In other words, the way people search and the terms they use need to be better recognized.

After providing some data that quantify the local search opportunity (i.e., 25 percent of searches have local intent), he argues that the opportunity is not being met with listing comprehensiveness (we hear you). A contrast to the category-based taxonomy of Yellow Pages is also made in pointing out that users’ search behavior has evolved.

Yellow Pages lookups (both online and print), in other words, have traditionally been headings driven (i.e., “plumber”), whereas the free-form search use case has conditioned searchers to be more specific (i.e., “leaky faucet”).

What does this mean for local advertisers?

if a business is identifiable in local search engines through only its name or category, it is not going to be found by the things that make it truly unique. In order to appear in organic local search engine results (the storefront’s virtual window), businesses must optimize for local search engines differently, focusing not just on their name brand, but instead on all the brands they carry, as well as all their services offered and much more.

A parallel concept is the granularity with which searchers are typing in geographic modifiers: They often go deeper than city- or ZIP-level terms. Urban Mapping bases much of its data generation on this premise, including its “geo mods,” which provide local advertisers with better geographic keywords to use in their search marketing campaigns.

Overall, the theme is clear: Table stakes in local search marketing (all search marketing for that matter) include providing comprehensive business information and choosing keywords that are both germane to your business and used with the greatest frequency by searchers. Successful search marketing, therefore, must turn the process around and act according to the evolving ways that users search for things.

This has reached the product level. And thanks to companies like Krillion and NearbyNow, it will soon go even further in reaching the level of real-time product availability. Users will be conditioned by positive reinforcement of these product searches, adoption will grow (especially this holiday season), and around and around we go.