Conversion Rate Web Marketing Blog 

Newt Barret explained an important shift in his blog post today, “Real World Experiment Explains Impending Demise of Yellow Pages”

Talking about the Yellow Pages® he says, “Their old slogan, ‘Let your fingers do the walking,’ was all about how easy it was to use the print directory compared to wandering around downtown looking for a store, a lawyer or a doctor.  Unfortunately, Google, Yahoo, MSN, and all the rest of the search engines are letting our fingers do the walking today.”

Newt’s statement perfectly explains the biggest challenge for the Yellow Pages® today. For many years the Yellow Pages® was the only way to find things easily. Those days are long gone.

Here in Australia, the Yellow Pages® is run by a former government monopoly called Sensis (part of Telstra), and it appears from Newt’s review that our Yellow Pages® does a much better job than the local Yellow Pages® in Florida.

According to Sensis, the Yellow Pages® book in Australia yields around AUD$1 billion of advertising annually and the Yellow Pages® Online a further $100 million.

Access is the key to Yellow Pages® success.

The Yellow Pages® is actually a massive repository of content. In the information age, what will make or break it is access to its content. Traditionally it could only be done through the book or the website directly.

A company of this size is typically slow at responding to market trends, however there’s too much at stake for them not to take action fast.

Yellow Pages® in Australia have responded to the challenge of access with initiatives like:

• Yellow in the Car - A small directory for use in the car
• Yellow Mobile - Online Yellow Pages® for mobile phones
• Go Stay® accommodation guide
• Yellow at Home portal website
• Choice buyers guides on the Yellow Pages® online
• Partnership with NineMSN and mylocal.com.au.

They’re making some good moves. 

For what it’s worth, here’s what I’d do to make the Yellow Pages® Australia into a $2 billion guide and to massively increase the value that it delivers to its customers:

1. Open up the category pages to Google

Imagine if the Yellow Pages® category pages came up number one in Google.

For example, search in Google on “Restaurants Melbourne.” Yellow pages are nowhere to be found. 

Would you be interested in advertising in the Yellow Pages® if it was number one in Google?

A quick review of the Yellow Pages® robots.txt file shows that they do not allow any search engine indexing of their content. This seems to be a legacy of pre-information age thinking about content (keep it all to yourself).

What if they simply created search engine friendly pages of content for each of their categories? They don’t have to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

2. Optimise the Yellow Pages® websites for conversion

The current Yellow Pages® online listings are set out very poorly for lead generation. Smart application of simple conversion techniques could massively increase the number of leads generated, and overall change the perceived benefit of the Yellow Pages® online from cost to investment.

One Melbourne business that we deal with gets over 400 leads from its website each month compared with 20 or 30 from the Yellow Pages®. However, this would be very different if the Yellow Pages® took these ideas on board.

It will be interesting to see if the Yellow Pages® can catch up to the massive market shift that happened when Google became the dominant search engine in early 2000.

What I do know is that you’ll see the Yellow Pages® around for many years to come. It’s a question of what form it will be in. Just don’t expect it to be in the form of A-K and L-Z.

From the author: If you regularly advertise for leads in the Yellow Pages®, in the newspaper or on the radio, then there’s a good chance that your website could be generating more leads for you than it is. The key is in your website’s conversion rates.

We know that to achieve high conversion rates and sales from your web marketing you need a team that includes seasoned marketers, web designers, web programmers, copywriters, editors, bloggers and search engine gurus. That’s why we created Bitemark.

And yes, we can get your website to number one in Google too ;-)!

Contact us on 1300 248 362 for a free conversion rate review of your website.

Yellow Pages® is an Australian registered trade mark of Telstra Corporation Ltd. This company has requested and has been granted permission from Telstra Corporation Ltd to use the Yellow Pages® trade mark. This company is not otherwise associated with Telstra Corporation or any of it’s subsidiaries.

Many of our clients use the Yellow Pages® Directory and the Yellow Pages® Online to generate leads for their businesses.

Over the last year we’ve had a chance to to try out the Yellow Pages® Online Platinum Ad concept with our clients. As illustrated below, the Platinum Ad is a group of 3 small ad tiles that sit above the search results.

If one of the 3 spots is available you can take up pole position in the search results for a selected keyword in your geographical area. The ad tiles link straight through to your website. Sounds good right?

Well, you’d think that having such a high position in the search results would mean guaranteed success. However, we’ve found a number of businesses who have been disappointed with the results of Platinum Ads. So we decided to examine the ads to find out why.

We reviewed 44 ads in the Yellow Pages® Online platinum ads system and we asked the following questions.

• Are the ads customer focused or self interested? 
• Will the ads be affected by banner blindness? i.e. Do the ads look like ads?
• How effective is the website behind the ad? 

The results show that there is plenty of room for improvement.

Are the ads customer focused or self interested? 

Good ad design, like good copywriting is focused on the client. That means, it targets their needs, pains, problems or wants and offers a solution.

Looking for references to the customer in the 44 ads, we found the following ratio:

Self interested : Customer focused 

40 : 4

We found that many of the ads we reviewed were accompanied by claims like:

• Largest range
• Best quality
• Lowest prices
• Best value
• Number 1

But what do these claims really mean? They might mean something to the advertiser, but what do the mean to the customer? Since the claims lack any specifics they are easily dismissed.

“Need help selecting…?” was the only customer focused question that we found in any of the ads.

A large number of the ads appeared to be solely focused on brand, offering little reason to click through. Others ads seemed to be designed in the hope that just saying “click here” would do the job.

Will the ads be affected by banner blindness? i.e. Do the ads look like ads?

One of the big problems that we found with Yellow Pages® Online platinum ads is that they typically look like ads. It’s well established that website visitors are becoming increasingly blind to online advertising, particularly banner ads. The phenomenon demonstrated by Jakob Nielsen is know as banner blindness.

Now I know what you’re thinking… Aren’t all Yellow Pages® Online listings ads?

Of course the answer is yes. All Yellow Pages® Online are paid ads. But most of them don’t look like ads, they look like search results. So we reviewed the ads in the study to determine if they were likely to be subject to banner blindness.

Look Like Ads : Don’t Look Like Ads

42 : 2

In reviewing the 44 ads, we found that 42 of them looked like banner ads. With only 138 x 95 pixels to play with, you don’t have a lot of room. However, the more heavily formatted the ad is the less likely it is grab attention.

How effective is the website behind the ad? 

When we looked at the websites behind the 44 Yellow Pages® Online platinum ads we found an even bigger problem. Most of the websites were poorly designed for lead generation.

We reviewed each site to see how easy it was to find the company’s contact details, and how easy it was to make contact with them. We rated it this way:

Poor: Contact details only available on contact page, if at all.

Average: Contact phone number on each page with a contact form on the contact us page.

Good: Contact phone number on each page with contact forms used well or a call to action used throughout the content.

What we found was:

Poor : Average : Good 

19 : 20 : 5

So even if the ads were getting clicks, the websites would be converting visits into enquiries poorly.

How to make your Yellow Pages® Online platinum ads effective:

Make your ads customer focused

• Write your ad text with customer in mind
• Address their common needs and problems
• Use a question if possible
• Make claims that are specific and that show how you can help

Avoid banner blindness

• Design your ad to look like content, not an ad
• Don’t dominate the ad with your logo
• Use pictures sparingly and carefully
• Test different ad designs.

Make sure your website is converting effectively

• Make sure your contact details are easily available
• Ensure the contacting you is easy through the website
• Use contact forms effectively
• Test and measure your website and Yellow Pages® Online platinum ad results weekly
• Most importantly, measure your conversion rates!

From the author: If you regularly advertise for leads in the Yellow Pages®, in the newspaper or on the radio, then there’s a good chance that your website could be generating more leads for you than it is. The key is in your website’s conversion rates.

We know that to achieve high conversion rates and sales from your web marketing you need a team that includes seasoned marketers, web designers, web programmers, copywriters, editors, bloggers and search engine gurus. That’s why we created Bitemark.

And yes, we can get your website to number one in Google too ;-)!

Contact us on 1300 248 362 for a free conversion rate review of your website.

Yellow Pages®is an Australian registered trade mark of Telstra Corporation Ltd. This company has requested and has been granted permission from Telstra Corporation Ltd to use the Yellow Pages® trade mark. This company is not otherwise associated with Telstra Corporation or any of it’s subsidiaries.

I often find myself discussing how to make Yellow Pages® Ads work better with my customers.  Quite a number of our customers invest a lot into their Yellow Pages® Ads, so we have built up quite a bit of experience at generating website leads through Yellow Pages® Ads.

I thought I’d share my thoughts on how Yellow Pages® Ads can work effectively with your website here.

Yellow Pages® is an Australian registered trade mark of Telstra Corporation Ltd. This company has requested and has been granted permission from Telstra Corporation Ltd to use the Yellow Pages® trade mark. This company is not otherwise associated with Telstra Corporation or any of it’s subsidiaries.

About the author: As the owner of a web marketing business, I’ve spent the last 7 years studying ways to boost the conversion rates of my client’s websites. Today, our best websites convert up to 20% of visits into leads and 50% of leads to sales. The target for our clients is a minimum 5% conversion rate on visits to leads which is staggeringly more than the typical website at 0.1%.

Bitemark specialises in designing, building, writing, managing and marketing websites with high conversion rates.