Google Maps Highlights Real Estate

Google Maps has announced changes to its real estate listings. Its real estate category is now more prominent, and rental listings have been added in the US. A new Comparison Ads tool has also been announced that is geared towards the mortgage market.
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reply.com New Online Marketing Platform

It’s been a big week for online marketing: Google Adwords has just announced it will be targeting mobile phones, starting with the Apple’s iPhone and online marketing platform reply.com has announced the launch of the world’s first marketplace for Enhanced Clicks.

Google Adwords going mobile is good news for everyone who uses this tool, but what exactly are reply.com’s Enhanced Clicks?

reply.com say it’s a way for “advertisers to gain access to their target audience without the complexity of traditional online cost-per-click advertising, significantly simplifying the profitable acquisition of locally-targeted customers”.

“Using the Reply.com Marketplace, there are no keywords to manage, no bid-management software to implement, and no need to outsource online customer acquisition to 3rd parties,” said Reply.com chairman and CEO Payam Zamani. “Instead, there are controls that allow advertisers of any size to access consumers who are looking for a particular product or service, select desirable locations, throttle volume, and dynamically set their desired price-per-click. The system automatically delivers the specified traffic, based on the advertiser’s budget.”

“Until now, only the most sophisticated businesses-with significant investments in Internet marketing-have been able to access online consumers profitably.” said Zamani. “We are on a mission to make Internet marketing available to businesses of any size by making it easy and profitable to generate locally-targeted and category-specific traffic.”

Coinciding with the announcement on Tuesday 2 December RAIN Radio hosted a show with guests from Reply.com. You can listen to CEO Payam Zamani, CMO Brian Bowman, and Manager of Online Marketing, Tom Young, discuss reply.com and answer questions online.

A slideshow on the product is available here.