6 more reasons to not advertise in Yellow pages
We all love yellow pages right ? WRONG.
Our business up till recently did advertise with yellow pages however we have stopped all forms of advertising for more reasons than one. Here i will go into 6 more reasons to not advertise in yellow pages and why you should consider stopping your advertisements with yellow pages.
1. Yellow pages gives bad customer service
Do you like to be on hold for 25minutes to then be greeted by a rep that does not have a clue what your talking about and needs to forward your call to another department to only be asked your security questions again ? I know this is not uncommon and if there is one thing that really gives me the sh$%s is repeating what i have just wasted my breath telling someone else before. Yellow pages is the king of this.
2. Yellow pages is a dead advertising medium
Yes this is true. Its not what it used to be. Have you noticed how yellow pages is now exploring different ways to get your business thru website design, online marketing such as SEO, PPC and other methods. Seriously what does yellow pages know about online marketing they are a company based around a off line advertising book. That’s it. They have not been in the game long enough to be called experts in online advertising with technologies such as SEO, PPC marketing. Its best to leave these online marketing strategies to the real experts not people who employee cheap labor and call themselves experts. Besides this in a 2008 report it estimated that they would loose close to 40% of their revenue over a 5 year period due to people not opting to advertise in the book anymore. However recent articles show this is happening quicker than expected. There are many other forms of advertising that will give you a better return on your investment.
3. Yellow pages has a poor return of investment
Talk about poor return on investment. We have advertised in yellow pages local for quite a few years and to be totally honest i think we received about 3 calls out of it. We should of stopped earlier however this was not on our priority list at the time. Will it work for you ? probably not however give it a try put an ad in your local yellow pages and test and measure it for a period of 12 months. I would say if you don’t get regular calls from it then its a waste of time and money. Be expected to pay in upwards of thousands of dollars for a decent ad too.
4. What about yellow pages online ?
No sorry this does not work either. A few years ago the system used to be fair and was based around first in best dressed. Now its all about who wants to pay the most to be listed up the top. We studied this and also advertised online for a couple of years but its important to find out how many possible leads you may get before you invest in this. For example if your a plumber find out from them how many people are searching for a plumber in your local area in a given month, if its thousands then i guess a conversion of 1-3% maybe ok as that would amount to a fair bit of work. However if its in the hundreds forget it, there is very little change you will convert to actual jobs. Why would people first visit yellow pages online when they have the power of Google ? Google is not just a search engine for information anymore its a full blow directory listing service that can find you the cheapest products, local tradesmen as well as latest news and much more. Its shown that 80% of all users have Google set as their homepage, and from this the searches begin. Think about it, when you need to look for a service do you search Yellow pages or Google first ?
5. Is yellow pages suited to any business ?
It may be, firstly big businesses may still see value in it. Why because they have deep pockets, it can cost in upwards of $30,000 for a full page ad in a yellow pages book, BANG! hows that. For the average small business i would say steer clear from it, unless you can inject some serious dollars into it and stand out from your competitors don’t bother.
Last but not least,
6. The proofing system is flawed
Yes its flawed, here is something we experienced and we are not alone on this also. On the 16th of December we got a call from Yellow pages asking to renew our advertisement in the book, they mentioned they would send out a proof and that we could make any changes if necessary. So happens that a week later our company went on holiday breaks till mid January. When we got back from our break we noticed an invoice in our Po box, and no proof. We were like WTF is this. We called them and they basically said that we never got back to them and that advertising was closed and that it was too late to make any changes, we argued that we never even got the proof in the first place and that they should of not asked for proofing during the Christmas break, they should be well aware that 90% of businesses do not trade during this time. Well it was bad luck for us, we had to pay. But we were not happy. Was this a tactic to swindle their customers ? or is their proofing system flawed who knows, but it was certainly fishy.
This wraps up our article on 6 more reasons to not advertise in yellow pages. Please LIKE and share our article.
Want some more reasons to not advertise in yellow pages. Check this article out on 11 reasons why your business should not advertise with yellow pages
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I wish I had read this article before signing onto a 6 month online ad contract with yellowpages.com.au. Long story short, DO NOT ADVERTISE WITH YELLOW PAGES!!!
I was sold a “Platinum Tile” ad, where it’s 3 graphic ads appearing above the organic search results. I was the only graphic ad for my category and after 3 months, I had 0 customer enquiries. That’s right, ZERO! Zero calls with no competition. Yet they keep telling me that my ad is generating 400 clicks a month.
I have however gotten a large increase in spam phone calls and emails ever since I got listed on yellow pages.
The contract I signed is $2000, and it is a complete loss. I feel like I paid all that money so I can get bombarded with spam all day.
STAY AWAY FROM YELLOW PAGES
Hi Tim,
Thanks for commenting on our article, we appreciate your feedback. Yellow pages is in fact the number one place for Cold Callers to search for leads because its easily accessible and easy to filter businesses. This is probably why you have gotten the increase in spam calls. The money you spent could have easily been used better elsewhere, infact one TIP, we have noticed MUCH better response just from signage on your vehicle, if you convey a good message across its probably been the best most cost effective offline advertising we have done to date. Good luck in your endeavors. 🙂
I am an electrician and have been advertising in the yellow pages online for the past 2 years and have seen some awesome results! Just because you obviously got stuffed over by the book doesn’t mean a completely separate platform won’t work..
Hi Brad,
Thanks for commenting. I think your one in the 1000 that can positively give praise to Yellow pages. I will agree with you to some extent i do think its still useful for some types of businesses such as electricians or even plumbers as some stll associate Yellow page with service based work. However how have you measured the success of your campaign ? have you asked the customer specifically every phone call “how did you find me ?” are you keeping a tally ?
If the answer is no then it can’t be for certain it’s yellow pages that is doing the hard work.
Nevertheless it’s worth investing in other marketing medium’s because i still think they offer better return on investment.
Thanks again for commenting.
Obviously you’ve had a bad experience, you’re venting – fair enough. Maybe you or I don’t use the book anymore, plenty of people still do, and obviously many more people are dearching digitally.
Yellow pages actually offer metered numbers which mean you can have a dummy number which appears in Yellow pages directories only, which means you can measure exactly how many calls you’re getting from yellow pages, that’s how we measure it with our business, and we get cracking results, and when we worked it out, it was a better return on investment than running a google adwords campaign.
Spammers or telemarketers apparently get prosecuted rigorously if they use Yellow as a marketing database, and being on a DNC list full-proofs. And if they’re dodgy enough telemarketers or spammers it’s going to happen anyway.
Also – you’re right about Google, ironically though if you’re searching for a business or service – half the time the google results bring up Yellow pages links. I think you’re drawing a long bow to say google is the best way to search for businesses or services, but hey.
Hi Stefan,
And thanks for commenting, yes our company did have a bad experience but hey bad experiences are the ones that surface the most before praise.
The aim of the article is to give an opinion based on the current state of Yellow pages and it as an advertising medium compared to what is in the market place today. The Yellow Pages book no doubt will be killed off slowly due to people moving digitally.
This has happened to the UBD Street Directory as of this year, the final edition due to increase numbers in GPS navigation.
Yes im aware they do offer numbers for tracking purposes, which is a good thing. Not sure what business your in, but i also did mention that it does suite some businesses more than others, i know for a fact that tradies get a lot of business from Yellow, however i believe professional services are the ones that suffer and there is better ways to promote ones business.
The reason your seeing results in Google is 2 fold, one because Yellow pages is seen as a reputable directory and has thousands of backlinks hence it shoots to the top when search for certain things. This does not mean however you need to spend big dollars to get to the top, having a free ad can yield results also.
Thanks for sharing your post and your experience as you can see from some past posts some people have good and bad experiences.
-DISCLAIMER – I AM NOT A YELLOW PAGES EMPLOYEE, NOR AM I ASSOCIATED WITH THEM, NOR HAVE I PLACED AN AD FOR MY OWN BUSINESS – DISCLAIMER
Your article reeks like your ad was designed absolutely terribly – most likely by the talentless Yellow Pages team. I’ve seen nothing but evidence of the yellow pages offering a great return on investment, when business owners have placed time, money and research into their advertisement. Sure, it seems like a dying medium and you claim to have received next to no sales – how exactly are you gaining these statistics beyond asking each individual customer? Have you employed *any* methods in your visitor and conversion tracking/analytics in order to directly track printed advertisement conversions?
As with any advertising medium, you need to employ your own common sense. You can’t just slap up any ad and think it’ll be the magic bullet. Hire an external graphic designer to do the important stuff. Hire a marketing expert to nail your sales copy and calls to action. Think of it as a sign on a highway. Anyone can place an ad there, but only the advertisers who actually place effort and knowledge into the planning and design of the advertisement will see a decent ROI.
This is why big companies hire marketing staff; They understand that it takes skill and experience to design a kickass, highly converting ad – not just placing a sloppy templated ad and hoping for the best.
Speaking from a background of mixed platform lead-generation based marketing, I can confidently say you may just need to learn a bit more about marketing and sales prior to completely dismissing the Yellow Pages.
Hi Mark,
I was about to spam the comment due to the fact it started off like a robot wrote it, but verified the website and also the hostname and seems legit.
FYI, Yellowpages are the ones that offer analytics and report on a monthly basis for the online medium and as far as Web development goes the statistics are extremely POOR!, as i mentioned in my article i did say that it may work for some industries… but not all.
We are entitled to our own opinion as much as anyone else and hence we gave our experience with Yellowpage and the countless amount of money invested.
Im curious to know how you stumbled across this blog ? Not to mention taken the time to give a rant as you did.
It seems your experience has nothing to do with marketing at all, your website is basically a web developer / designer i do not think that qualifies as have marketing experience. Sorry.
We have ventured in out online marketing mediums that has given us 10 times the amount of qualified leads than what Yellow Pages has.
BTW read some of the comments below we are no the only ones that have a bad experience….. so good luck with it, keep advertising in Yellow pages if it works for you 🙂
YES
First. Yellow pages is a total waste of money.
Second. The only Customer service you will ever receive is at sign up, after that nothing.
Third. For you who say the yellow pages works, try taking that money putting it into your website and SEO and see how much better your results will be.
And lastly, even the yellow pages has been saying they are going to stop making the book. The end is in sight.
I responded again because I keep getting emails notifying me of responses to my comment i made about a year ago…
I noticed you mentioned that some tradies etc may do well out of yellow Pages, I’m a mortgage broker, I’ve tried SEO and SEM and it was RIDICULOUSLY expensive, some $40-$50 per click, and I ended up employing an SEO company saying they were Australian and turned out to be outsourced from Pakistan (surprise surprise). Both complete wastes of money.
I run a digital heavy program with yellow online targeting specific suburbs with a link to my site, and it worked far more efficiently, as I’m spending around $1500 p/m as opposed to 3 1/2 grand a month I was spending on SEM and SEO, and I just change the suburbs I want to target, and change the online content myself online when I need to. people using Yellow online tend more to be buyers, in my experience.
I don’t know about the book, I don’t use it personally, but I get the odd call here and there which found my ad in print (it’s pretty small). It worked out the same price roughly to include a print ad with a value package, the only reason I bothered putting one in.
Stopping the book altogether? I haven’t heard that anywhere. where did you hear that? Is there a link, or news feed on this – I can
The customer service I’ve had has been pretty good – I think if you’re smart and just take responsibility for your advertising, you can do well out of Yellow.
Make sure you get call tracking, use the merchant centre and do your research, don’t ever wait for someone to get back to you would be my advice.
Hi Stefan,
3.5 grand on SEO, wow thats a lot and for that amount of money they better of worked hard to get you to the top and prove some sort of return on investment ???
Yes you are completely right many many people outsource to India these days, i know of one particular SEO company i almost worked for that is locally based but outsources the actual SEO work to India, the funny thing is how would someone in India know about your business, know your services, and know your local area, demographics etc….
We offer SEO services for far far less than what you paid with measurable results.
I have heard all to many times people paying big bucks for little to no return on the investments.
Good luck…. P.S you can manage your subscription on the bottom of this text box and unsubscribe from any links you have elected to be notified on.
Cheers.
We’ll in my market yellowpages.ca is number one for all my keywords (e.g. Oakville Painters). As well they drive local results for bing and yahoo ….. I think you just need to be smart about it ,,, if they are they in control of your keywords it’s likely a good way to go. As well it’s a good domain with a very high domain authority (at least in Canada) – a sponsorship ad increased my page rank greatly.
I agree. YP advertising is not as effective as it used to be and most who do advertise are carryovers from the YP book. I’d recommend utilizing a niche directory for advertising (one strategy out of several) your business as they bring targeted traffic to your business. A few examples would be:
http://www.findmydentist.com
http://www.findlaw.com
If the advertiser has the right ad design, a company can do very well with YP.com and the print product. I almost completely depend on this medium to drive new customers to my business day in and day out. I am in the appliance repair business, the ads are tracked and combined they deliver anywhere from 80 to 100 calls a month. Needless to say, the ads are paying for the investment.
I dont agree with you mate, yellow pages really work for my business, if you compare the price with google ads and expensive SEO, they still good, yes, maybe the book is dead, but their website still at the top of the least for many keywords, also it might not works for some rare businesses as nature of those businesses, but for me and few friends as plumbers its really work- thanks anyway