A hot topic over the past 12 months has been the future of Yellow Pages. What will happen to Yellow Pages in 5 years? Ten years? Is Yellow Pages dying? With their recent logo adjustment to remove the printed book and simplify to just walking fingers, it is clear that Yellow Pages is adjusting it’s approach in order to keep its advertisers and its users alike and switch to a online and print focus instead of their primarily print-focused perspective of the past.
That said, 80% of Canadians are online, and while Yellow Pages claims that 16 million Canadians use their network every month, 82% of all Google Searches are looking for local results as well. That’s some seriously tough competition.
I decided to do a little digging on this topic as I’ve got one client who gets great ranking on Google and also does some decent Google AdWords advertising every month as well. He has also got a lot of eggs in Yellow Pages basket, but for this experiment I am looking only at his online Yellow Pages advertising. My recent number crunching concluded this:
- His Yellow Pages advertising brought visitors to his website at a cost of around $7.50 each and accounted for 2% of his website’s traffic.
- His Google Advertising brought visitors to his website at a cost of around $1.80 each and accounted for 35% of his website’s traffic.
- Google Organic results brought visitors to his website at no cost and accounted for 40% of his website’s traffic.
That means that in total, Google brought my client 75% of his website’s traffic! Amazing.
After digging up these results it was amazing to me how successful Google is at bringing traffic to websites. That is what they do best. Deliver relevant results to their end users. In fact, Google is the highest traffic-driver for all websites that we host.
So in conclusion, Google is the rock and Yellow Pages walking fingers are the scissors. I think you know what happens next.