Is it time to stop advertising in the Yellow Pages?

[timeshifter]

I know some of you are laughing: "you still advertise in that thing? nobody looks at that anymore", etc.

I'm going into my 14th year in business. I do residential and very small business. One man show.

When I was getting started I didn't think I could afford to advertise there. But someone talked me into it, and I was glad for it. At the time (2004, 2005, etc.) I'm confident it helped me grow my business. Over recent years I've thought about cancelling it or changing things around, but felt that I didn't want to mess with success. I think it gives me some credibility to be able to say I've been in the book for 14 years.

The numbers don't add up now. Over the last 5 years about 25% of my sales have been from new customers (acquired over the last 5 years). But most of those new customers are from referrals or other sources. If I look at just customers who I think came from my YP advertising, that makes up about 3.5% of sales.

Viewed another way, my ad is about $250 per month and I'm getting $300 per month in revenue from that ad.

That charge is not just for the book. Say $175 goes for the annual listing in the physical book. The other $75 goes for supposed placement on yellowpages.com and whatever affiliate bs they say they're linking me to.

I know it's time to let it go. But it's hard to let it go.

Thoughts?

 

[phaZed]

Get rid of it. It's not worth it and is really only going to be viewed by a small subset of people. If you think about it, the whole idea of the Yellow Pages is done. "Yellow Pages" referred to the big book hanging under telephone booths - or under your home's "land-line" phone.

When having an index of phone numbers in a book was the only practical way, it made sense. Now, it does not.

Phone booths and land line's are gone, along with "the book" - fast becoming bygone relics of the past.

 

[Mercenary Roadie]

I don't know many that even have a Yellow Pages book yet alone know that there is a Yellow Pages website and at $3000.00 per year your wasting your money.

 

[jft135]

I'm also most likely dropping my listing this fall. In the early years, we still saw a lot of traffic from our ideal demographic since they still used the book. Now almost everyone uses a smartphone and we get only 1-2 leads a month at a cost of $175/mo. The only reason I kept it last year was because of the supposed SEO benefit of a listing on DexKnows.com.

 

[sapphirescales]

The book is dead meat that's been rotting in the sun for almost 10 years now. They fooled quite a few business owners into believing that their ridiculous websites actually got any traffic and that having your business listed there has any value, but it was just a stopgap measure to try to slow the sinking of that massive ship of a company.

If you talk to the supervisor of the supervisor there and DEMAND actual NUMBERS from them, you'll see they're ridiculous. I live in a pretty large suburb of about 80k people and I'm less than 15 minutes from a large city with over half a million people and do you know what the REAL numbers I was getting were like? Like literally less than 200 people searched for "computer repair" on their website from my area every MONTH! Even if I was #1, I'd be lucky to get 2-3 calls PER YEAR from that stupid website! I can't imagine how bad the numbers would look in a smaller city. You might as well take that $300/month they ask for their listings and throw it out the window. I would literally classify their company as a scamming company nowadays. They're relying on holdouts like you and complete dumbasses that have more money than sense in order to stay alive. Now if they lowered their pricing to something that's actually reasonable (like $50 per YEAR) then I might consider it. But they'd rather screw people and fool them into thinking that their service is actually worth something.

 

[jft135]

The book is dead meat that's been rotting in the sun for almost 10 years now. They fooled quite a few business owners into believing that their ridiculous websites actually got any traffic and that having your business listed there has any value, but it was just a stopgap measure to try to slow the sinking of that massive ship of a company.

If you talk to the supervisor of the supervisor there and DEMAND actual NUMBERS from them, you'll see they're ridiculous. I live in a pretty large suburb of about 80k people and I'm less than 15 minutes from a large city with over half a million people and do you know what the REAL numbers I was getting were like? Like literally less than 200 people searched for "computer repair" on their website from my area every MONTH! Even if I was #1, I'd be lucky to get 2-3 calls PER YEAR from that stupid website! I can't imagine how bad the numbers would look in a smaller city. You might as well take that $300/month they ask for their listings and throw it out the window. I would literally classify their company as a scamming company nowadays. They're relying on holdouts like you and complete dumbasses that have more money than sense in order to stay alive. Now if they lowered their pricing to something that's actually reasonable (like $50 per YEAR) then I might consider it. But they'd rather screw people and fool them into thinking that their service is actually worth something.

It was working great around here until ~18 months ago. I have separate tracking phone #'s (my own, not the book's, so I can trust the data) and can run profit analyses by cross-referencing with PCRT. Lately though it's barely breaking even, so I think it's time to pull the plug.

 

[sapphirescales]

It was working great around here until ~18 months ago. I have separate tracking phone #'s (my own, not the book's, so I can trust the data) and can run profit analyses by cross-referencing with PCRT. Lately though it's barely breaking even, so I think it's time to pull the plug.

Adwords gives me about a 500% ROI. If I can only do a little better than break even with an advertising method (I'm looking at you Twitter), I'm basically working for free and it would be much better to just increase my Adwords budget.

 

[glennd]

I'm pretty happy myself. I got a call from a new customer courtesy of yellow pages just today! That's the second call this year. How could you be unhappy with that!

 

[nlinecomputers]

Phone book goes straight into the trash can when I get one. Waste of resources to print it.

 

[glricht]

I'm going into my 14th year in business. I do residential and very small business. One man show.

When I was getting started I didn't think I could afford to advertise there. But someone talked me into it, and I was glad for it. At the time (2004, 2005, etc.) I'm confident it helped me grow my business. Over recent years I've thought about cancelling it or changing things around, but felt that I didn't want to mess with success. I think it gives me some credibility to be able to say I've been in the book for 14 years.

We are almost the same as you: had our 14th birthday this month; residential and SMB; one man show; etc. When we started in 2003 as an onsite-only business, we advertised in the local newspaper (every day) and the Yellow Pages (the phone company's YP, not the independent YP book).

But over the last 2-3 years, new business from YP has dwindled to just break-even, so this spring we cancelled all our YP ads (we were in 4 books). We still advertise in the local newspaper and it's paying for itself, but no YP anymore.

p.s. nowadays, the vast majority of new business comes via referrals.

 

[CLC]

I still go in the smaller local only phone books because they are like $50 per year, but Dex and Yellowbook are just not worth it. If you are established and been in business for years in the same area there is no need this day and age. If you are just starting out advertising is extremely important so go all in especially if you are looking for older customers that don't look up phone numbers on the internet.

 

[GTP]

I stopped advertising in the Yellow Pages about 2 years ago. In the 5 years I was with them I spent about $3000 for bigger ads, etc but never got a single customer (that I know) of from it.

 

[Diggs]

Careful with the carte blanche trashing of Yellow Pages (the book). They are still used by some of the oldest generations which is exactly a target market due to the illiteracy with PCs that that generation has. I don't advertise in the YP but the demographics reached may be good for some.

 

[mdownes]

Over here, it's called the golden pages. When we set up in 2003, it was expensive but essential. Over the next few years, the price rose by exactly 3% every year, regardless of my protests. Around 2010, we started tracking where new customers were coming from and found that every new golden pages customer was costing about €55! Felt pretty stupid, but lesson learned.

 

[jft135]

Phone book goes straight into the trash can when I get one. Waste of resources to print it.

Don't do that. The books are still really useful. I used to collect newspapers for my chimney starter, but they were a pain to store. I can just keep the yellowbook out by the grill without having to worry about paper blowing all over the place. Whenever I need to start some charcoal, I just tear off a few pages. It's really compact and convenient, and as a bonus, you get to watch lawyers burn.

I've also used them to replace a couch leg back in my college days, they make great chew toys for various pet rodents, use for emergency TP, etc.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/01/six-modern-uses-for-the-y_n_3193827.html

 

[timeshifter]

Sent him my cancellation notice. Immediate call. I let him try to sell me and then told him I'm still cancelling. He said OK and was polite, but told that I was going to disappear from the Internet.

 

[Archon Prime]

I signed up for the website section for YP. Terrible decision, but it's only 15/month. Won't renew that's for damn sure. not getting anything from that site.

 

[ElementalWindX]

I haven't advertised in YP in probably a good 5-6 years. Not worth it. Sleezy sales people too. They even forged my signature to re-sign me up to a contract. That was a complete wtf time.

Now I just wish I had something just as good (during it's golden days) to replace it. Ad words on google feels like throwing money in a fire. Has anyone else found a golden replacement?

 

[jft135]

I haven't advertised in YP in probably a good 5-6 years. Not worth it. Sleezy sales people too. They even forged my signature to re-sign me up to a contract. That was a complete wtf time.

Now I just wish I had something just as good (during it's golden days) to replace it. Ad words on google feels like throwing money in a fire. Has anyone else found a golden replacement?

Properly set up adwords works great. It's really hard for us to rank in the city to the north even though it's pretty much the same city. Adwords gets us in front of people in outlying areas.

I avoided it for years because I can't understand why anyone in their right mind clicks on those ads. Then I realized that the type of people who click on them are exactly the kind of people who need my help.

 

[ElementalWindX]

Properly set up adwords works great. It's really hard for us to rank in the city to the north even though it's pretty much the same city. Adwords gets us in front of people in outlying areas.

I avoided it for years because I can't understand why anyone in their right mind clicks on those ads. Then I realized that the type of people who click on them are exactly the kind of people who need my help.

How much money are you throwing at it on a monthly basis?