Cancelling Yellow Pages Advertising

How and Why You Should Cancel Your Online Advertising With Yellow Pages

Before I continue writing this, I should point out that I don’t particularly have any ill will towards Yellow Pages or the services they offer. I believe in some cases businesses should utilize the combination of website rental + digital advertising + traditional marketing techniques they offer, but I can also at the same time say that I have personally moved over a dozen businesses throughout the years away from Yellow Pages online advertising, helped them cancel their accounts and start up digital advertising that performed much better at a fraction of the cost. It wasn’t long ago that the Vancouver Courier put out an article where “Businesses Blast Yellow Pages Advertising” for a lack of performance and bloated costs so I won’t re-iterate what has already been said.

The truth is that I can give a perfect example of how I helped a business cancel their Yellow Pages Advertising contract, set them up on a much lower cost per month plan and then see better performance. A retail mechanic shop was paying Yellow Pages over $1,400 per month for digital advertising. Each month they would receive a report and it was clear after I reviewed the reports and analyzed their cost per click that they were getting between $400 – $600 worth of digital advertising spend and then nearly a $1,000 advertising management fee every month.

What I believe happened, and this is my opinion, is that the advertising was set up, they optimized the ads maybe once per month (for an hour max) if there was poor performance and then sent an automated report to the client with a long list of graphs and numbers relating to impressions, click throughs and a bunch of other numbers that meant nothing to their businesses bottom line.

We cancelled their Yellow Pages advertising contract and I set them up on a $250\month google ad plan that increased their conversions and phone calls, with better reporting and a noticeable increase in business. This was simply because I optimized the ads steadily and and ensure that we were running ads in the right geographic markets to the right people, at the right time. The business was then able to utilize that additional $1,000+ a month in traditional marketing approaches that they knew worked and were missing out on because they were spending so much money on online advertising.

That’s right, for a savings of over $1,000 a month, we:

1. Increased their businesses phone calls.
2. Monitored and reported conversions on their website.
3. Implemented better SEO on their website.
4. Installed tracking and reporting tools.
5. Increased the transparency so they knew what was happening.
6. Targeted customers better.
7. Allowed them to free up spend to use in other areas of their business.