Online Services
Every month about 65 million people use Internet Yellow Pages (IYP) to locate the products and services they need. 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 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:
• 65 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! has its own
yellow page directory with over 7 million unique
visitors per month (i.e. not including the same
visitor returning). Yahoo! uses data from InfoUSA
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). They
are now partnering with YellowPages.com (see below),
which has enhanced the quality of their listings.
However, the usage of Yahoo!’s yellow pages
has been undermined by their more successful, and
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) has good local listings and a lot
of advertising in the most-used categories. It has
over 10 million unique visitors per month for its
own site, over 33 million counting all its partnerships.
These include AOL Yellow Pages, Yahoo! Local & Yahoo!
Yellow Pages, the Alta Vista and LookSmart search
engines, Anywho.com, Cingular Wireless and the old
Bell South’s RealPages.com.
Verizon's Superpages.com is available through the Lycos network, MSN.com, the Infospace network, Excite and others. It generates roughly 18 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. However, they are certainly one to watch, having made a great many mergers and acquisitions in the past few years, doubling and redoubling their traffic.
Switchboard has been the fourth most popular online directory with over 6 million unique visitors per month, available through Netscape and numerous other partnerships. Listings are fairly accurate and can be adjusted by distance from a particular location, a useful feature that has uses in mobile phones and PDAs. It is now part of the Yellowpages.com network (see above).
DexOnline.com is the leading IYP in the states where Qwest is the utility phone company, with around 4 million visitors per month from those states. Outside the Qwest service area it uses unreliable direct mail data from InfoUSA (see above).
There are of course others doing yellow pages on the Internet, but they seem likely to be outspent by the major players. As with search engines, consolidation continues to occur, with some players, such as Zip2 (which was one of the few early players in the field, now subsumed into Infospace), having already vanished with the internet bubble.
Perhaps the biggest long-term threat to the IYP model, however, is 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.
There are rivals offering this type of advertising - Overture, for example, now owned by Yahoo! and renamed Yahoo! Search Marketing. While not offering Google's commercial reach, it may be a better bet for business-to-business advertising.
Most recently, Microsoft has also tried to muscle into the search engine market, with quite impressive results based on their portal at MSN.com and Live.com. They are still not within reach of either Yahoo! or Google, although they have been luckier than Amazon.com. Amazon had an innovative approach at A9.com with street photography and updatable business information, but this feature has now been discontinued and their search results have been taken over by MSN.
The trend is 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 (Superpages and DexOnline.com). 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 (16 million visitors per month) and Google Local Search (23 million visitors per month). Most local businesses do not yet have their own websites, which may explain the success of comparative newcomers such as City Search (now with nearly 15 million visitors a month).
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