According to additional data from Compete and Google, we’ll continue to see B2B companies duke it out in paid search. Their report cites 73 percent of U.S. B2B execs used an online search engine last June to conduct purchase research.

In addition, the study also revealed more reliance on video. Google and Compete polled more than 1,600 U.S. execs and tracked the online activity of U.S. Web users both to and from selected B2B websites. Between February 2010 and March 2011, B2B-branded YouTube searches doubled.

Recently, Yelp posted a video on its business blog of SMB advertising success stories. Time will tell if we’ll see more brands using video content to share product-specific information, demos and testimonials.

SMB reseller WebVisible went through difficult changes last year, downsizing from 320 to 130 employees and retreating from an ambitious direct marketing program. But it has kept core partners intact; key members of the CEO’s installed executive team have stayed intact; and the company has aggressively ramped up its technology program. It is now poised for sustainability and growth, according to CEO Ron Burr, who took over from co-founder Kirsten Mangers last September.

“We made some expensive mistakes on the direct business,” says Burr, former head of NetZero, who joined WebVisible last year. “We took our eye off the ball on our partner business. But now we are refocusing on our channel partners.” In addition to keeping key accounts such as McClatchy and BT, WebVisible recently won the account for Recruit, a $10 billion Japanese company with 12 media properties.

Burr notes that all through the strife, the company has maintained revenues of roughly $25 million. Roughly 70 percent of revenues were U.S. based, and 30 percent were international. This year, the ratio should be 60 percent U.S., and 40 percent international. There should also be 10 percent revenue growth in 2011.

The growth is partially attributable to the rollout of a more efficient, cloud-based tech platform, and new technology that allows the company to “understand the effectiveness of particular keyword structures in a campaign, and how they concert to action by consumers, whether phone calls or clicks. The tech results in a 30 percent increase in effectiveness,” says Burr. WebVisible is also focused on providing customers a centralized database for local advertising, whether it is tracking Groupon, clicks or e-mail marketing. “It all needs to co-exist,” says Burr.

“The interesting thing about the pure plays in this space … ReachLocal, Yodle and WebVisible … is that nobody’s made it to profitability,” adds Burr. “That’s the tack we are taking now. Run this company profitably with a viable business strategy.”

Online “ad versioning” has taken on heightened significance as national and regional brands vie for their own piece of the sizable local advertising pie. However, as SEM becomes more sophisticated and consumers expect smart targeting from commercial messages, basic metro-level campaigns often don’t suffice. Kenshoo realizes that and is implementing its Conversion Attribution Modeling platform with national clients to allow them to effectively build out hundreds of search campaigns targeted to specific store locations.

Kenshoo’s director of product marketing, Ariel Rosenstein, told BIA/Kelsey that for retailers and other businesses with diverse geographical locations, consumers are in different “life cycle” stages (awareness, consideration, intent, purchase), meaning that keywords resonate differently based on a buyer’s position in the purchase funnel. If these distinctions are not accounted for, then the unwanted result can be the misallocation of online budgets to keywords that are not optimizing. Generally, this plays out with a business overvaluing the last click prior to purchase while discounting other keywords that may have been essential in driving the ultimate conversion.

Kenshoo’s Real Time Tracking mechanism gives large-scale businesses running multiple, simultaneous campaigns a location-specific window into where clicks are originating from and where they’re leading. Based on how this behavioral pattern points to conversion, combined with the goals of the client, a national-local franchise can apply weight attributions to decipher which keywords are most effective in driving purchases. Campaigns can then be modified to accentuate powerful keywords and redirect away from less effective ones.

For instance, if a business is courting initial customers, it may choose to place additional weight on early clicks that introduce potential buyers to a brand. Meanwhile, time-sensitive campaigns can invoke time decay attribution so that more recent clicks receive more value.

Image Credit: Kenshoo

Rosenstein showcased Kenshoo client Extra Space Storage as an example of the importance of attribution weighting to understanding the unique, and often segmented, behavioral and buying patterns of a customer base. Notably, nearly 25 percent of ESS’ conversions included “some geographic term, yet they were running general campaigns. They needed to add local keywords.” Additionally, almost one-third of conversions had “a brand keyword in the path,” making it important to shift away from “prefer last” keyword attribution to more balanced models that accounted for the importance of brand awareness. And in some geographic areas, conversions occur more quickly than in others.

The next game changer for national-local brands is social media, which plays a dynamic role in the customer life cycle and has heavy cross-over with search. Kenshoo is already using Facebook’s API to attribute conversions from social channels. Its next, more ambitious step is to build out a full social ad campaign management tool, currently in beta.

As local businesses increasingly transition their advertising dollars online, they expect agencies and publishers to furnish them with simple, consolidated solutions supported by tangible, trackable ROI. MerchEngines built its white-label “relationship generation” system to enable online marketing providers to do just that for their SMB clients.

In a crowded online marketplace, where bigger firms such as ReachLocal, Yodle and WebVisible also compete to service SMB agents, MerchEngines’ value proposition is the comprehensiveness of the toolkit that publishers can implement and local merchants can benefit from.

There are eight key features in the suite, including a “SocialStream” layer that tracks activity across four prominent social networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google Buzz).

PPC search campaign management is fundamental to online search offerings, and MerchEngines is no different, supplying a single interface to customize, amend and track campaigns across multiple search engines. Tied to both SEM and social is CallAnalytics, the branded service that allows SMBs to establish call-tracking numbers and monitor traffic from both search and social.

Also of note is OneList, which disseminates a local merchant’s listing across more than 40 business directories (Yelp, Superpages.com and many more). The eight-tool portfolio is encompassed in a single online dashboard that agencies and publishers can conveniently access to monitor and change campaigns.

MerchEngines was founded in 2005 by longtime Internet executive Andy Steuer. In 2009 it sold to Hostopia, the Web site hosting unit of Deluxe Corp.

The latest move is to enter the local search wars, going up against the Yellow Pages; third-party resellers like ReachLocal, Yodle, WebVisible and Orange Soda; and direct customers of Google AdWords itself. The effort, which is a partnership with Clickable, extends earlier efforts that provide SMBs with online payment processing, comprehensive insurance information, and international payment and wire transfers.

According to VP of Business Solutions Rob Ciccone, it is all part of an effort to “provide a portfolio of tools to help SMBs grow revenue. We have excellent knowledge of SMB needs [and] a very large customer base,” he says. Those are supplemented by non-customers who are users of Amex’s OpenForum site, which provides articles and boards and e-mail links for a wide variety of SMB topics.

The Search Manager product itself has some advantages for SMBs, adds Ciccone. Most notably, it uses Clickable to manage search across multiple search engines, including not only Google, but Yahoo, Bing and Facebook as well. The product also includes a daily recommendation feature for improving campaigns. SMBs that don’t want to manage their own campaigns can use Search Manager Assist, although that carries a higher premium of 8 percent to 10 percent per month. The price of unassisted search is 5 percent of ad spend, or $49 per month — whichever is higher.

The search products are initially being promoted at trade shows and to the credit card and OpenForum list. They include a 30-day free trial.

New York Connects, the local “content discovery” project launched late last year by New York Magazine and Clickable, has seen definite progress since its launch last December, according to NYmag.com General Manager Michael Silberman. Silberman spoke to us as part for a broad profile on NYmag.com’s extensive vertical efforts being issued in BIA/Kelsey’s Marketplaces program.

New York Connects enables local businesses to tap into the power of search keyword advertising through easy-to-understand lead generation tactics. Advertisers who sign up get a search campaign optimized for their business to drive qualified leads, a customized landing page and a dashboard to track leads, conversion and ROI.

Initial categories include weddings and dentists, which are frequently featured in New York Magazine. New York Connects makes the multi-category weddings franchise a year round money maker, taking it well beyond the twice-yearly special issues, says Silberman. Home design and spa services are also likely to be added this summer.

McClatchy Co., the third-largest newspaper entity with 30 newspapers in 29 markets, including The Miami Herald and The Sacramento Bee, will aggressively target SMBs in each of its markets via an extended deal with WebVisible. The deal, per release, “will help local advertisers provide the most efficient way to get found by customers no matter how they’re looking — in newspaper listings, newspaper web sites, or search engines, or via mobile phones or navigation devices.”

The company has had a long relationship with WebVisible, offering services in Kansas City; Tacoma, Washington; and Fresno. But now it is pulling out all the stops. Anchorage and Charlotte have already been added; the next phase will include Boise, Miami and Sacramento. By December, the rollout will encompass all 30 daily newspapers in 29 U.S. markets.

James Calloway, McClatchy VP of strategic development, tells us that McClatchy’s sales forces have seen a dramatic increase in advertisers demanding help for getting into search marketing. “There is a learning curve. It is a different state of mind,” he says. But McClatchy’s papers that have been working with WebVisible have “done well.”

Calloway says a key to getting it right has been to offer advertisers an option of going with either a guaranteed click model or a budget based model offering a range of services for a fixed amount. Over time, he sees the guaranteed model fading. But “we basically need to cover it,” he says.

Calloway’s gut feeling is that the offering will take some time to develop in each market, but that it will get decent numbers from the get-go and will continue to grow over time. It will be part of a broader package, he says. The WebVisible effort is being supported by McClatchy’s five-person local market development team, which is based in Miami. They work on a a SWAT team basis, in which they hit a market, get it going and move on to the next one. They are tasked with in-market sales training and ramping up revenues.

WebVisible recently raised $20 million, and has raised more than $37 million in all, as it competes against other third-party SMB sales companies such as ReachLocal, Yodle, Marchex and Orange Soda.

In the second “installment” of its quarterly report “State of Small Business Online Advertising, Search Edition,” WebVisible reports that its SMB clients increased their online search spending to an average of $2,149 in Q4 2009, an increase of some 30 percent over the Q3 level, and 111 percent over the level of Q4 2008. In addition, it reported that other related metrics, such as conversion rates and keyword, increased. (Note that the SMBs surveyed are WebVisible’s customers, which are already using online search, and are more “evolved” than a broad cross-section of SMBs.)

Perhaps one of the more interesting trends identified in the research (to the extent to which one year can reveal a trend) is the increase in conversion rates (defined as the percent of search clicks converting to Web site actions or calls). This metric stood at 26.6 percent in Q4 2008, and has increased to 35.3 percent in Q4 2009.

Also notable is the explosive growth in video, from 5.2 percent of advertisers with video on their sites in Q4 2008 to 19.2 percent in Q4 2009.

The report also includes interesting findings on SMBs in the U.K. Not surprisingly, their behavior patterns for online advertising are very different. For example, the average U.K. small business spent only $183 for online search in Q4 2009 — about 9 percent of their U.S. counterparts.

Finally, the report contains information on the distribution of SMB advertisers by business category (for the U.S. and the U.K.), as well as an insightful approach to segmenting the unruly SMB marketplace.

CityGrid is Citysearch’s answer to taking more control of the local online space for the benefit of its partners. Citysearch’s goal is to transition from a Web site to a local online media company with a content ad platform. CityGrid offers local businesses unprecedented reach across CityGrid’s network of 100-plus Web and mobile partners, complete with search engine optimization and marketing. CityGrid Complete was created through a strategic partnership and investment in OrangeSoda and other partnerships to create a comprehensive network of high-traffic sites. CityGrid aggregates uniform profile pages across its entire network. Citygrid’s standard profile page approach helps publishers know how to drive more content, which helps bring more organic traffic.

CityGrid Complete is the online advertising solution that gives local businesses the ability to reach millions of consumers monthly by building customizable content ads that are distributed across the Web. In addition to content ads, CityGrid Complete includes SEO services designed to drive consumers from all the major search engines directly to their own Web sites. CityGrid Complete customers also receive access to an integrated Web-based dashboard allowing advertisers to actively monitor and manage their campaigns, ensuring they receive the highest quality leads for their advertising budgets.

“Whether it’s driving new customers to our advertisers from major search sites or mobile applications, CityGrid Complete is about delivering local businesses the highest quality leads for the best value,” said Herratti, “giving advertisers and publishers access to a one-stop local advertising solution with SEO strategies and tactics that historically required a large dedicated team of experts.”

Citysearch announced today that it has shifted its ad model for small businesses, moving from the cost-per-click model that it pioneered several years ago to a new model that will drive consumers directly to their own Web sites. The new model provides advertisers with a complete range of SEO and marketing services across the CityGrid network of 100 Web and mobile partners.

The new services are being offered as “CityGrid Complete,” and will use Orange Soda as a partner. As part of the announcement, Citysearch also announced an investment in Orange Soda, which competes with the likes of ReachLocal, Yodle, WebVisible, Marchex and MatchCraft to resell search engine advertising and optimize content. Orange Soda currently works as a reseller for media companies such as Gannett and Freedom Interactive, and also works with franchise operations such as Remax and Jiffy Lube.

Neil Salvage, Citysearch executive vice president of sales and service, said the announcement is consistent with the enlargement of his own job description, which now includes product development on the merchant side. Salvage acknowledged that Citysearch has had a “not robust” search engine marketing platform, and has been searching for a better solution for 18 months.

“We talked with everybody,” Salvage said, and came to the conclusion that Orange Soda is a superior solution with a “robust back end oriented system.” Its SEO solutions “fit somewhere between ReachLocal and Yodle,” he added.

To Salvage, what’s really important about the announcement is that Citysearch is moving away from its complex cost-per-click sales model and toward a fixed-fee model that will boast a wide bundle of services. The move should allow Citysearch to increase its monthly yield from$600 to $800 per advertiser to more than $1,000, said Salvage. “That’s where we need to be.”

Cost-per-click overemphasizes the reseller factor and has become “old school,” added Salvage. “It was built to go after Yellow Pages, but wasn’t really appropriate because the Citysearch product set did not really support that. It was an entertainment site. Now we want to focus our time and energy on platforms and the process,” he says. “We are focused on signing up more publishers, not on owning the [SMB] relationship. ”

Citysearch CEO Jay Herratti is a keynote speaker at Marketplaces 2010, which is taking place March 22-24 in San Diego.