ypSearch Marketplace Brings Programmatic Local

YP is making keyword bidding local with its new ypSearch Marketplace, which aims to push national brands to local markets.

The ypSearch Marketplace will allow brands to programmatically bid on cross-device keywords. It will also enable marketers to use geo-location targeting to push destination-targeted information in order to drive online-to-in-store sales, much like another of the brand’s recent offerings, the Cross Device Retargeting tool that delivers search-based local ads that travel from desktop to mobile.

“Our marketplace uses best-in-class technology, which enables us to run a real-time auction for each local search query and present optimized offers to each client,” Darren Clark, chief technology officer at YP, said in a prepared statement.

The ypSearch Marketplace product will also allow users to import campaigns from other search engines, like Bing and Google, and use them to target the YP network’s 80 million users. The company says the benefit of real-time keyword bidding on the smaller search engine is the actionable results YP offers. According to a recent comScore report, 77 percent of YP’s 80 million users who initiated a search reached out to a merchant and 66 percent made a purchase.

It remains to be seen whether or not YP can make itself a contender in the search wars, but a recent slew of product offerings, like last week’s local PPC search feature, suggest that YP is certainly ready to put up a fight.