If you go back 25 years, there were only 3 traditional ways to market your company: Television, Radio, and Print, which included Yellow Pages. For many businesses, Yellow pages was a guaranteed bet on leads. The philosophy was very easy for everyone to understand. The more money you paid, the bigger the ad space you got, the more leads you received. The issue that many clients ran into was that if they were small, they couldn’t compete with companies that invested tens of thousands of dollars in Yellow Pages. Decade after decade this was the norm. However, over the last 10 years, there has been an ever increasing transfer of power from the traditional 3, to countless ways to get in front of your clients. Yellow Pages has attempted to adapt to this new world. However, they have simply adopted the same model as print advertising and transferred it online.
How did Yellow Pages Adapt?
Eventually, after seeing that people were transferring their budgets from Yellow Pages over to online marketing, Yellow Pages begrudgingly made a half hearted step into a new arena. If you browse around their online directories it is easy to see that they are inconsistent, duplicate, and aren’t providing diverse options for their clients. Imagine if some of the ad space in a traditional yellow pages book was inconsistent with wrong addresses and phone numbers. Currently, that is what is taking place on YP.com.
YP.com and Advertising Space
Yellow Pages and YP.com do have one similarity. The more money you pay, the higher your ad moves up in ranking. Allowing you to get more clicks, and more potential leads. However, when clients invest in YP.com’s advertising, there is little optimization on the clients end to fine tune their monthly campaigns to lower cost per click or reduce budgets. A client can’t even see how much traffic each particular keyword generates daily, monthly, quarterly, or annually before investing. Your YP rep doesn’t even know how many people are clicking on the top listing, compared to the last listing. I had the privilege a few weeks ago to speak to a client of ours YP representative. I stated a simple question:
“Is there any breakdown of the percantage of clicks that occur on the Ad space you buy on YP.com. For example: How is the traffic broken down on all of the ad space that is offered on YP.com from position 1 – 12?”
The Yellow Page representatives response explains the issue with investing in YP.com’s online listings,
“As for the question below (seen above), I don’t think I have data on percentage of clicks. I know when I see reports of current advertisers that the higher placed ads get most of the traffic that the ones below. I have compared some categories where the Priority Local Listings (top 6) sometimes get up to 4 times more clicks/ calls than the lower placed ads.”
Our clients solution? The more money they paid, the higher their ads were placed, and sometimes they could get 4x more clicks/calls. However, they were never provided any hard statistics of what that daily, monthly, quarterly, or annually looked like. We weren’t even provided with how much traffic YP.com directories get in the clients companies territory. However, I did some research to see just how those directory listings looked in regards to ad space.
It’s Crowded at the top
Although Yellow Pages may be old, they are still somewhat authoritative to Google. Although that authority is waining, as less and less people use Yellow Pages, in smaller areas, they can actually outrank local companies and even end up on the first page. Yellow Pages knows this, however, they aren’t creating a very good result for their clients online.
Check out a screenshot here of just how crowded those ads can become.
As you can see, the top 8 listings are all ads, and there is now way to differentiate between the other, outside of a profile picture. Then if you look to the far right of the page, potential clients are exposed to more ads. Leaving potential leads confused on who to choose and companies lost on how to stand out. Our clients Yellow Page representative did tell us that we can move up their directory “organically” by updating the clients profile with pictures and information. However, it is hard to imagine that many people are truly scrolling to the 9th selection on to find a new company to work with. To make matters worse, we were never given any specifics of how many people are clicking on organic links either. Not very much transparency.
Thinking of Investing in YP.com?
Before you invest in their directory listings, remember to think about this, Yellow Pages wants to drive traffic to their website so you will want to advertise on it. All you are doing is renting space on a directory that is renting out the same space to your competitors in hopes of getting a click. You have more options by skipping the directory and spending the time and energy to create your own website, manage a SEO campaign, invest in a PPC campaign, while boosting and promoting posts through your social media channels. A strategy that you will have to do regardless to stay relevant as a business in the future.
Are Their Markets Where Yellow Pages Can Still Be A Viable Option?
Believe it or not, yes. If you are are plumber or lawyer there could be some revenue left in this avenue. If you read my prior blog, “How to chose an Online Marketing agency”, you should have some valuable data at your fingertips on the demographic that is reaching out to you from your advertising avenues. Seniors are still using the Yellow Pages. Their generation grew up using the Yellow Pages and it is still a viable research tool used by their generation. If you are finding a decent amount of traffic through the Yellow Pages from Seniors, ask your Yellow Page rep during re-enrollment, to make adjustments to the cost of your advertising space.
