I had a client ask me this interesting question the other day, and although I had a (admittedly biased) hunch, I did not have any real data to back up what I thought to be the answer.
Could it still be worth a web advertisement with one of the paper-based operations like the Yellow Pages or Dex, even if their big yellow books are mostly headed toward recycling bins? (There is a fresh one in mine, right now…)
Data shows that droves are moving online to research their buying decisions, but where exactly are they going? Are they just simply typing what they need into their favorite search engine? Or is “Yellow Pages” so ingrained in their minds that YellowPages.com is the first place they go?
Let Us See Some Graphs.
I could not find any research that had already been done on the subject, so I looked for my own. Google Trends is a tool that allows users to compare the popularity of any number of search terms graphically over time.
I compared Maps.Google.Com to YellowPages.com. These are the results:
(Maps.Google.Com : red) (YellowPages.com blue)
Two things stuck out to me: Google Maps got (and is getting) huge. And although not as steep, we can also see a slow decline in searches on YellowPages.com.
(As a side note: I didn’t include Dex because the line was too small by comparison. Picture a third bumpy line along the bottom of the graph.)
What Does It Mean?
Well, to say that we can write off YellowPages.com entirely would be hasty. However, if it is on the decline, there may be a point in the future when it no longer has any significant relevancy.
Now, even though YellowPages.com appears to be on a downward trend, that doesn’t mean that it does not (and will not) have significant traffic well into the short-term future. If the advertising is cheap enough, it just might be worth it.
To find out more, I put in a call to Yellow Pages customer service, and spoke to a friendly customer service rep. He told me that there are a variety of options YP offers for online-only advertising, ranging from about $150-$500/month, depending on the prominence of the ads and the area.
At a conservative $200/month, that’s $2,400/year. Is it worth it? Well, it is hard to draw a conclusion without knowing how much the resulting increase in business is worth to your company.
However, from the chart we can see that Google Maps gets roughly double the traffic of YellowPages.com. Compound this observation with the clear trends for each site, plus the added fact that Google.com is displaying its preference for Google Maps entries by including them at the top of the results for any local search (an example of a local search is “Elgin, IL Dentist”). Additionally, there are multiple search engines returning local results, but only one Yellow Pages. For the expected return from advertising on YellowPages.com to be worth it, getting a high and relevant result in Google Maps and other local search engines better be pretty darn expensive.
Just Call Me Paul Harvey…Not.
I didn’t even see this pitch coming! But, getting a prominent spot in Google Maps is not expensive compared to working with Yellow Pages online. (Think about it: they are a large and old institution with executives, salespeople, and HR people to pay, and then they need to make a profit on top of that.) No doubt that there is room for both online advertising and local search optimization, but as the graph shows: times, they are a changing.
Give us a call to find out more.
-Craig
