When Jackie Mitchell was launching her doggie day-care business in Tacoma two years ago, she spent most of her limited advertising dollars in the local yellow pages.
Now her business, Bark Central, is booming – but she says more customers have found her through her Web site than through the phone directories.
This isn’t the usual tale of new media overtaking old media, however.
In a new twist, Mitchell is paying the nation’s third-largest publisher of yellow pages, R.H. Donnelley Corp., to both run her Web site and distribute online ads on search sites such as Yahoo Inc.’s.
The yellow pages are finally getting Internet-savvy. After years of fruitlessly trying to sell ads on their own Web sites – which get relatively few visitors – many of the directories have begun reselling ads to their customers on bigger, high-traffic Web sites such as Yahoo and Google Inc.
“We’re media agnostic,” says Simon Greenman, senior vice president of digital strategy, innovation and products at R.H. Donnelly. “Our strategy is to connect our customers with their customers wherever they may be.”
Only about 14 percent of U.S. print yellow-page advertisers – about 600,000 – are purchasing online ads from the yellow pages as well, according to estimates from Kelsey Group, a local- advertising research firm in Princeton, N.J. By 2010, the number is forecast to hit 1.2 million advertisers, or about 30 percent.
One reason for this slow growth is the relatively low traffic that the yellow pages attract to their Web sites.
The most popular yellow-pages site, Verizon Communications Inc.’s SuperPages.com, attracted 17 million visitors in April, according to comScore Media Metrix, an Internet measurement firm based in Reston, Va.
By comparison, Yahoo attracted 128 million visitors and Google attracted 108 million visitors to their search pages during the same period.
So the publishers of the top directories – including AT&T Inc., BellSouth Corp., Verizon and Donnelley – decided to offer small businesses a service that would allow the businesses to get their ads seen by consumers using those high-traffic sites.
The service, called click packages, works like this: The yellow pages, on behalf of advertisers, bid on search keywords like “carpet cleaner” in online auctions. The top bidders’ ads – typically a few lines of text – then run on the right-hand side of a page with results of a search for the keyword.
The advertiser pays a flat monthly fee for a guaranteed number of customer clicks on those ads, which link to the business’s Web site. So the yellow pages will keep bidding for various keywords until the guaranteed number of clicks is reached. And the ads stay up as long as it takes to generate those clicks.
Yellow Book says it’s in the process of rolling out a product called WebReach, which won’t charge a flat fee to advertisers.
Instead, advertisers will pay according to the price of the clicks purchased – so barbers will likely pay less per click than mortgage brokers.
Henry adds that WebReach will only purchase ads on the top-tier search engines – Yahoo, Google, Ask.com, Microsoft Corp.’s MSN.com and Time Warner Inc.’s AOL.com – unlike other yellow pages, which purchase across as many as 30 sites.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
