Matchpoint Partners With The Wall Street Journal Online

Matchpoint links are now found on the Journal’s Careers, Real Estate and Small Business sites. Adotas included a comment from a WSJ online representative.

We are excited to add Matchpoint as a new online advertising offering for large and small businesses on The Wall Street Journal Online,” said Pat Rodeawald, director of transactional products for WSJ.com. “Now these businesses have a way to reach our users who match the profile of their target customers and who are searching for services.”

Matchpoint provides the perfect storm of relevant assistance and lead-generation for users, advertisers and publishers.

Agreement also expands customer reach for businesses advertising on Matchpoint

Mountain View, California—17 March 2008— Matchpoint, an online service for consumers to find and select businesses, and The Wall Street Journal Online (www.WSJ.com), a leading provider of global business and financial news, today announced an agreement that enables WSJ.com’s users to request competitive offers or proposals from various businesses.

“Most publishers are looking for new ways to monetize their sites beyond what they can do with display advertising,” said Adams. “Our search forms provide publishers with access to new revenue streams while also giving their users a valuable service.”

Matchpoint forms are currently available on WSJ.com’s Careers, Real Estate and Small business sections, enabling users to find and select businesses in a wide range of related categories. “We are excited to add Matchpoint as a new online advertising offering for large and small businesses on The Wall Street Journal Online,” said Pat Rodeawald, director of transactional products for WSJ.com. “Now these businesses have a way to reach our users who match the profile of their target customers and who are searching for services.”

“The Matchpoint platform gives businesses an opportunity to present consumers with personalized and targeted proposals,” said Peter Adams, president of Matchpoint. “Businesses can bid different amounts for the opportunity to be matched with consumers based on how closely a consumer’s needs match the profile of their target customer.” The agreement provides WSJ.com with an additional self-service advertising platform for businesses to use to effectively reach selected target customers.

Matchpoint Unique Benefits
• Matchpoint is pioneering a new way to connect people with needs directly to businesses with solutions.
• The major benefits for each audience segment includes:

o For Consumers: Matchpoint offers consumers a completely private way to describe their needs and request competitive offers and proposals from relevant businesses.
o For Advertisers/Businesses: The Matchpoint marketplace provides any business a new approach to meeting potential customers. Going beyond click-based ad models, Matchpoint provides a way to pay for introductions to consumers whose needs match the profile of their target customers and respond to them with relevant offers or proposals.
o For Publishers: The inclusion of relevant Matchpoint forms or links within its sites’ content provides publishers with a new way to tap into new revenue streams as well as enhance the user experience of their web sites.

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About The Wall Street Journal Online
The Wall Street Journal Online at www.WSJ.com, published by Dow Jones & Company, is the largest paid subscription news site on the Web with one million subscribers worldwide. Launched in 1996, WSJ.com attracts a rapidly growing audience of industry leaders and influentials. The award-winning site provides in-depth business news and financial information 24 hours a day, including breaking business and technology news and analysis from around the world. The site draws on the Dow Jones network of nearly 1,900 business and financial news staff – the largest network of business and financial journalists in the world.

The Kelsey Group has it right. The Yellow Pages is all about leads. That’s why small businesses consider it such a dominant part of their local advertising.

The only problem is that Yellow Page dominance has not translated on-line so easily. This is causing Internet Yellow Page (IYP) players to face some tough issues as they try to compete with Google on-line.

One of these issues has to do with pricing models. The monthly or annual listing fee model that Yellow Page players employ offline, has limited scale in the world of online advertising (more on that later). This has led IYP players to add cost-per-click (CPC) pricing for online listings. The problem is that CPC pricing is not nearly as universally accepted among local businesses as it is for the on-line businesses that dominate the Google and Yahoo search marketplaces.

The allergic reaction that local businesses have towards CPC pricing stems from the fact that most local businesses are not on-line. What do you do with a click when you don’t have a web page/site to bring people to? Perhaps more problematic is the fact that the 40% of local businesses that do have a web page often lack the skills, time, or resources needed to effectively convert clicks into offline business. This makes advertising in CPC marketplaces costly and very risky for local businesses.

That leads directly to another big issue that IYP players face and that has to do with competing against Google for ad distribution on other web sites. This issue stems from the fact that Yellow Page companies have not yet been able to convert the majority of their advertisers to online performance based pricing due to the reasons previously mentioned.

These two issues create a very real catch-22 for the Yellow Page industry…

At Matchpoint we’re taking a different approach to helping local businesses acquire customers on-line. Staying true to the Kelsey Group meme, we’re all about leads.

Unlike listings that may or may not generate clicks, businesses purchase leads in the Matchpoint marketplace. Our leads give businesses access to qualified consumers that have confirmed interest in finding a specific category of service provider. Businesses can use the phone or e-mail to convert their Matchpoint leads into customers.

See what people are starting to talk about. Give Matchpoint a try.

If you’re a local business, sign-up and start generating leads for your business. Alternatively, if you are a local web site or publisher, you can add Matchpoint to your site and earn revenue from the leads you generate.

March 7, 2008

Going Beyond Search Engine Marketing: Matchmaking for Business

The SmallBusinessTechnology.com blog posted these comments about Matchpoint:

However, for many small businesses, online marketing is still a challenge. Into this void steps in a service like Matchpoint.

Small businesses can use Matchpoint to find a variety of products and services. Matchpoint narrows down their request to 3 – 5 vendors providing what they need. The vendors can choose to contact the small businesses via email or phone. But guess what – the small businesses email and phone information is not given to the service provider — it’s cloaked.”

A small business can utilize the power of online search without having to know anything about the complexities of online marketing or even have a website.