A hot topic over the past 12 months has been the future of Yellow Pages. What will happen to Yellow Pages in 5 years? Ten years? Is Yellow Pages dying? With their recent logo adjustment to remove the printed book and simplify to just walking fingers, it is clear that Yellow Pages is adjusting it’s approach in order to keep its advertisers and its users alike and switch to a online and print focus instead of their primarily print-focused perspective of the past.
That said, 80% of Canadians are online, and while Yellow Pages claims that 16 million Canadians use their network every month, 82% of all Google Searches are looking for local results as well. That’s some seriously tough competition.
I decided to do a little digging on this topic as I’ve got one client who gets great ranking on Google and also does some decent Google AdWords advertising every month as well. He has also got a lot of eggs in Yellow Pages basket, but for this experiment I am looking only at his online Yellow Pages advertising. My recent number crunching concluded this:
- His Yellow Pages advertising brought visitors to his website at a cost of around $7.50 each and accounted for 2% of his website’s traffic.
- His Google Advertising brought visitors to his website at a cost of around $1.80 each and accounted for 35% of his website’s traffic.
- Google Organic results brought visitors to his website at no cost and accounted for 40% of his website’s traffic.
That means that in total, Google brought my client 75% of his website’s traffic! Amazing.
After digging up these results it was amazing to me how successful Google is at bringing traffic to websites. That is what they do best. Deliver relevant results to their end users. In fact, Google is the highest traffic-driver for all websites that we host.
So in conclusion, Google is the rock and Yellow Pages walking fingers are the scissors. I think you know what happens next.
I don’t think Yellow Media is going down anytime soon. They are an invisible local advertising behemoth with 1.5 million business listings under it’s belt that are ready to be serviced for local online advertising. They also have 2200 media consultants spread out across Canada selling the same online media services that you offer. Print is becoming a secondary issue as they morph into what is already Canada’s largest Internet company. Not even Google can field that many expert media consultants. I also find it quite interesting that the Google Maps in Canada would be quite useless without the Yellow Pages feeding them 99% of their listings with the most up to date information on them.
Take a look at their smartphone apps for Iphone, Blackberry and Android. Most people in Canada with a smart phone now use this free app. The Ipad app is amazing. With one touch you can get all the local advertising that you could want.
This has become one of my top apps on my iphone and ipad. Cheers!
Hi Lisa,
We also thought of the same thing about Yellow Pages, but this time, we want to hear it directly from the people (on the street). So we went out and do a little random survey in the streets of Melbourne. Here’s what we got after:
Q1. How often do you use the print version of the Yellow Pages?
* 7.69% use it regularly
* 23.08% once a month
* 15.38% once a year
* 53.85% never use it
Q2. How do you search for products and services you’re looking for?
* 92.86% use Google.com
* 7.14% use Yellow Pages
Respondent Quote: “I reckon the yellow pages is obsolete, why would you spend money on the yellow pages when they’ll just as easily find you on Google.”
Q3. How often do you use Google?
* 100% use Google.com everyday
Respondent Quote: “If I need information I go straight to Google.”
There goes, the scissor still is Yellow Pages. I’d still be excited though to know what’s next to YP since this has been an issue for years now.
Cheers,
Dave