Online Services
Every year there are over 2 billion searches
on the main Internet Yellow Pages (IYP)sites
to locate products and services. IYP usage has
grown tremendously in the last several years
to the point that it has become a significant
lead generator for many companies. Research shows
that people who use IYP generally do so instead
of, not in addition to, traditional print yellow
pages. Fortunately, reaching these IYP users
is still relatively inexpensive.
There are many IYP sites, and it's
important to make sure a business has the right
presence on the right sites to achieve the lowest
cost for the best leads. IYPs advertise their own
brands to build awareness and also drive traffic
to their sites through strategic partnerships with
recognized online players.
As a certified national yellow pages
agent, we monitor the relative performance of the
major IYPs for traffic, affiliations, features
and cost. Although a national IYP site may have
significant traffic, usage will not be evenly distributed
across the country. We place advertising on the
sites most effective for our clients' target markets.
IYP advantages:
• trackable - one of the most verifiable ROI of all media
• little crossover with printed yellow pages
• geographically sensitive
• no close dates – your advertising can be placed or changed in
a matter of days
• low risk – low entry level, limited commitments, substantial ROI
• very targeted audience – quickly reach millions of users at the
moment they're ready to buy
Internet Yellow Pages (IYP) statistics:
• over 80 million people use IYPs every month
• 84% of IYP users contact a business they found
• 62% of IYP users made a purchase from a business they contacted
There are several types of IYP ads:
Banner ads. These are used to
promote general public awareness of a brand. They
usually appear at the top of a web page above the
listings. In the past, they were not usually very
focused beyond a certain market area, so that you
might, for example, have ads for electronics companies
appearing randomly above listings for florists.
It is still not certain that banner ads offer
real value for the advertising dollar. The increasingly
savvy web surfer tends to ignore them, just as
they do elsewhere on the web. In response, advertisers
have tried increasingly intrusive means to get
attention: blinking, animation, pop-up and now
pop-under ads that remain annoyingly on the desktop
long after you have quit the page you were looking
at.
Enhanced or "sponsored" listings.
This means that your company is listed above the
others at the top of the page (i.e. above the alphabetical
or geopositioned free listings). A logo or a clickable "button" typically
then drives the internet surfer to your website
or an enhanced listing on another page supplied
by the yellow page provider.
Email links. These
can be provided with your listing to enable the
consumer to contact you directly. This is often
used as a good way to test the effectiveness of
the listings. Increasingly, it is also possible
to make phone calls directly from the listing,
which is another way to directly test their effectiveness.
The main players in Internet Yellow Pages advertising
are either connected to the leading web search
engines or "portals" (e.g., America Online,
MSN, Yahoo!), or to the traditional yellow pages
publishers who capitalize on their names to drive
traffic to their own internet listings and advertising.
Some portals are now linked directly to publishers'
yellow page listings, because they generate millions
of page views per day and yellow pages is often
one of their most popular features.
Here is an assessment of the most popular Internet
Yellow Pages directories in the US Western States:
Yahoo! once had
its own yellow page directory with over 4 million
unique visitors per month (i.e. not including the
same visitor returning) usings data from InfoUSA
and aother data sources which is not updated regularly
enough to be accurate and is very difficult to
correct online (compare trying to get an old mailing
list corrected). However, they are now partnering
with YellowPages.com (see below), which has enhanced
the quality of their listings on what has replaced
their IYP product, the much more user-friendly
Yahoo! Local site, which now attracts over 16 million
unique visitors per month.
In California and other states where AT&T is
the utility phone company (previously under the
names Pacific Bell, Southwestern Bell (SBC), SNET
and Ameritech), YellowPages.com (formerly
SmartPages.com and now rebranding as YP.com)
has good local listings and a lot of advertising
in the most-used categories. It has over 31 million
unique visitors per month for its own site, over
60 million counting all its partnerships. These
include AOL Yellow Pages, Yahoo! Locae, Bing.com & Bing
Local, & Anywho.com
Verizon's Superpages.com is
available by itself and a multitude of partnerships.
It generates roughly 35 million unique visitors
per month. Its listings are rather inaccurate and
incomplete outside Verizon's own telephone service
areas, but you can change your own business information
for free online. They are certainly still one to
watch, having made a great many mergers and acquisitions
in the past few years, doubling and redoubling
their traffic.
Yellowbook.com is
an attractive site that has grown to over 25 million
users a month despite coming rather late to online
from the print product. it remains to be seen if
they can catch up with the other players.
Switchboard was
once the fourth most popular online directory with
over 6 million unique visitors per month, available
through Netscape and numerous other partnerships.
. It is now part of the Superpages.com network
(see above).
Dexknows.com is
the leading IYP in the states where Qwest is the
utility phone company, with around 6.5 million
visitors per month from those states. Outside the
Qwest service area it uses unreliable direct mail
data from InfoUSA and other data sources (see above)
but it also picks up useful review information
from Yelp.com.
Both Yelp (over 13 million visitors)
and Citysearch (over
9 million) offer review sites that also diseminate
their results and ad campaigns across the IYPs
and the Google, Bing & Yahoo search engines.In
fact all the IYPs have taken a leaf from these
review sites to try to make their content more
useful to the casual surfer with reviews and extra
information about the businesses. The battle between
the "traditional" searchg engines, the
IYPs and sites like Citysearch has been heating
up lately to try to cazpture the high percentage
of web searches that are actually looking for a
local business or service.
The biggest long-term threat to the
IYP model remains Google.
Google is amazingly popular, it has sponsored/enhanced
links above the free listings, and it also has
a new method of paying for the listings it calls
AdWords (to the right and top of the page). Advertisers
bid for position and only pay as customers click
through to their site. These AdWords appear on
AOL searches as well.Now it is after the local
business advertiser as well, and has already forced
rival Yahoo into the arms of Microsoft and the Bing search
engine with its dominance of the search market..
The trend continues for some convergence
of the IYP and search engine approaches to internet
advertising. Now IYPs are starting to offer pay-per-click
advertising based on the Google model Meanwhile,
the search engines are offering Local Search, an
option that is ultimately based on the yellow pages
model, albeit with more content (maps and web links).
See Yahoo
Local and Google
Places. Most local businesses still do not
have their own websites, which may explain the
success of Citysearch and
social network sites such as Yelp,
which offer information from their own online communities
to review and rate businesses.
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