Local Marketing Guide

I've certainly dumped on both Yellowpages.com and Superpages.com and their lack of customer service before. However, according to a comscore study reported on by Mediapost, those two lead in market share of local searches.

Here is the list of the top Internet yellow pages sites and their percent market share in the 4th quarter of 2007.

Yellowpages.com Network - 20.2%
Superpages.com Network - 20.0%
Yahoo! Sites - 17.9%
Google Sites - 15.1%
Yellowbook Network - 8.6%

Yellowpages, Superpages, Yahoo and Google (not sure about Yellowbook) all offer free listings for local businesses and definitely should be tried out. I would just be cautious about doing any paid listings or pay-per-click with either Yellowpages or Superpages however.

I don't know what it is with these local business directories and their sneaky ways of making money. I ran a test for a client a few months ago but we spent only about $4 on clicks. Since we paused the campaign, I've gotten a couple of e-mail notifications that they were charging my credit card $15.

Strange, I thought, so I called them up (if you e-mail their customer support about any problem, they respond saying you that you have to call them for support) and they told me that the $15 is a monthly charge just to keep the account open. Not to mention that this is a ridiculous policy, it turns out that you won't know about this until after you complete your order and you read through their terms and conditions, which appears on the thank you page.

If I'm out $30 because I didn't read the T&Cs, I'm not happy, but I can live with that so I ask them to stop charging my credit card. Then they say they can't and that to stop the credit card charges, the account has to be closed, and the account can be closed only by the person who opened it (my client). So let me get this straight - my credit card is getting charged monthly, I call up the company that's charging it, and they tell me that I can't stop these charges??

I hope Google Maps and Yahoo Local destroy these guys (yellowpages.com and superpages.com)

One of the advertising channels considered for a recent campaign for a local business client was yellowpages.com. I wrote about this campaign in a previous post.

This was the first time I've done any paid advertising with yellowpages.com and I'd like to describe the hell they've been putting me through.

Before I go on, I just want to make a point of saying that I'm not a noobie when it comes to working with paid online services. It's what I do for a living. I work with Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, Microsoft adCenter and have subscriptions with 2 web hosts, Skype, Carbonite and Flickr. I have never had a problem with a vendor's terms and conditions until now.

I had decided on doing a $50/month premium listing with them that basically gives you more visibility on the business listings pages. The process for creating an account and then your listing is awkward and very unstreamlined. I glossed over the terms and conditions (because when you use a lot of online services the way that I do, you just assume that the larger service providers like yellowpages.com have reasonable T&Cs so it's not worth your time to read through them - an assumption that I figured out to be wrong later), entered in my credit card info and clicked submit. When done, I had no idea of what the payment schedule was or what the next steps would be.

Okay, I thought. Maybe they'll send me an e-mail telling me what the next steps are or when the listing would go live. I received no e-mail, so I called their customer support two days later. I asked for clarity on the payment schedule, and they said that it was $50/month with a 12 month minimum. "Okay," I said, "let me cancel this listing then." This 12 month minimum was news to me and I wasn't interested in having the paid listing run for that long (after all, this was part of a 2 - 3 month campaign). Their response was basically, "It's too late. You agreed to our T&Cs and clicked submit. We have to charge you." Flabbergasted, I told them that this payment schedule wasn't clear at all, to which they told me that had I read the T&Cs, it would've been clear.

I don't have statistics on what percentage of people read the T&Cs before signing up for an online service, but I would bet it's way below 50%. You generally assume that they're reasonable and that if there's an issue, customer support will help you make it right. Which brings me to my next point - locking someone into a 12 month contract for something like a premium listing are not reasonable terms and conditions. I can understand for services like a cell phone where there are significant upfront costs that they would want a term contract. However, with a premium listing, there is no cost to them associated with setting it up. Yellowpages.com tricked me into this 12 month contract by not being clear about it, and as soon as I clicked the submit button, they wouldn't let me out.

Appalled by their attitude towards customer service, I logged in and changed the credit card number so that they wouldn't be able to charge me. They then started sending me e-mails of threats that they're going to send this to a collections agency, so I logged back in and changed my e-mail address. Hopefully this will be the last I'll hear from these pathetic buggers.

A client of mine recently came to me with a request for running some advertising to boost new business inquiries during a peak time of year for him - the winter season and new years. About half of his new business comes in through his website and most of that traffic is coming from Google organic search and a citysearch listing.

Since this is the first time that he's committed an ad budget, we wanted to test several partners/channels to see what would work. $1,500 isn't quite a lot of money to work with especially when spreading that out over maybe 5 channels and then comes the fact that my fee has to come out of that. As an initial budget, I estimated that I would spend $500 worth of my own time, and split the remaining money amongst the 5 channels. Since this was a test, and also the first time running advertising for him, there would be a lot of work to do on my part.

The 5 channels we chose are Google paid search, Yahoo paid search, MSN/adcenter paid search, superpages.com pay-per-click and a premium listing on yellowpages.com.

With any ad campaign, it's important to have tracking measures in place so that you can see what channels are getting what return-on-investment (ROI). I had Google Analytics already set up on this client's site, so we were all set on tracking.

So that I could get some detailed reports on how the campaign was doing, such as which ads or keywords were converting better, I used Google’s URL Builder tool to create unique landing page URLs. You don’t have to use this tool for tracking Google ads because it automatically does it for you if you have the auto-tagging option turned on in account preferences.

For Google, Yahoo and MSN/adcenter, we used a list of about 25 keyword phrases and 3 ad variations and for Google and Yahoo, we included their content networks for broader reach and also as a way to hopefully drive the cost-per-clicks down. MSN/adcenter doesn’t have a content network yet, so obviously we can’t utilize it.

The two internet yellow pages sites (superpages.com and yellowpages.com) have so far been disappointing as far as getting launched on them. I’ve tried to create a campaign on with superpages but it hasn’t been going up, nor does there seem to be any record of my having attempted to create a campaign. Yellowpages.com has a 12-month requirement (at a minimum of $50/month) for their premium listings and once you’ve submitted your request, they won’t allow you to back out of it, so you can’t test their premium listings offering without shelling out $600. We decided to hold off on using Yellowpages.com for now.

As far as the campaign performance goes, we’ve driven about 100 clicks, but so far there have been no conversions – leads in this case, where a prospective customer has to fill out and submit a brief form. We’ll see how this goes and I’ll post an update on this soon.