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This battle is a lot closer than most of you can imagine. I’m constantly hearing about how the Yellow Pages are dying and there’s no value in them. While most may say that I’m biased because of the number of years I spent in the industry, the same cannot be said for Google Analytics.
Google Analytics cannot lie, it has no biases and, thank goodness for the Yellow Pages, paints a much different picture than many so called experts. You just have to know what to look for.
Below you’ll note one of our clients Year to Date Analytics numbers. Most likely you’ll instinctively focus on the ‘Visits’ column, marvel at the 5,504 visitors referred by Google Organic Vs 884 referred by Yellow Pages and call it day. I decided to take a closer look.
The Facts:
I knew that in Canada YellowPages.ca traffic is solid.
* 44% reach of all online Canadian
* 10.1 million Unique visitors in Q2, 2007
* Directory source for several online portals and wireless partners, including:
Google
Sympatico.MSN.ca
AOL.ca
Netscape.com
Bell Mobility
Canada.com
Cyberpresse.ca
Globeandmail.com
NationalPost.com
Telus Mobility
As a result, I drilled down on the Analytics and found the following following referring sites:
pagesjaunes.ca
superpages.ca
canada411.yellowpages.ca
sympatico.msn.yellowpages.ca
canada411.pagesjaunes.ca
areaguides.yellowpages.ca
mytelus.yellowpages.
aol.yellowpages.ca
canwest.yellowpages.ca
The Results:
I credited Yellow Pages for the referrals, bringing the total traffic numbers to 5,504 for Google and 1,261 for Yellow Pages. I know what you’re thinking, that�s not much of a difference. That’s true until you look at the following four key metrics:
1. Bounce Rate
(the percentage of single-page visits)
Google: 55.04%
Yellow Pages: 27.07%.
2. Pages Per Visit
(average number of pages viewed during a visit)
Google: 3.27
Yellow Pages: 3.93
3. Average Time Spent on Site
Google: 2.07
Yellow Pages: 2.29
4. Percentage New Visits
(percentage of visits by people who had never visited the site before)
Google: 87.07%
Yellow Pages: 89.24%
Conclusions:
Clearly Yellow Pages visitors are more engaged than Google�s. They’re also 100% less likely to bounce, view 20% more pages, spend 12% more time on the site and, with almost 90% of the traffic being from people who’d never been to the site, reach a different audience!
If you slice the numbers even further, subtract the bounce rate from the gross ‘visits’ number to reflect the possibility that this audience didn�t consider the site relevant to them. This reduces the totals to 2,474 visitors referred by Google Vs 921 referred by Yellow Pages.
Next time a client asks you if they should pull all of their advertising from Yellow Pages, check your ego at the door, and take a closer look at the numbers. As I said at the outset, it�s closer than you think.
As posted in Tips, Yellow Pages, Stats, Local Search, Google, Canada.
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12 Responses to “Google Vs Yellow Pages”
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kher » Google Vs Yellow Pages Says:
December 9th, 2007 at 9:33 pm[…] Check it out! While looking through the blogosphere we stumbled on an interesting post today.Here’s a quick excerptI’m constantly hearing about how the Yellow Pages are dying and there’s no value in them. While most may say that I’m biased because of the number of years I spent in the industry, the same cannot be said for Google Analytics. … […]
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Google Versus Las Páginas Amarillas | Search Engine People Blog Says:
July 10th, 2008 at 9:25 am[…] es una traducción al español de: Google Vs Yellow Pages escrita por Tom […]
November 6th, 2007 at 12:43 pm
Interesting stuff here Tom.
I also believe that people who are searching on the yellow pages site are further along in the buying cycle than those who are using search engines. They’re probably past the information gathering stage (something they used Google for) and are now looking for local businesses which provide the products/services that they’re in the market for. Unfortunately I don’t know how trackable that would be since most of the people using yellow pages probably purchase in store.
November 6th, 2007 at 7:44 pm
Hi David,
Agreed, the YP user has cash in hand an they’re ready to buy.
This step can be tracked by directing the IYP referral to a custom landing page and counting the download of coupons or directions.
January 11th, 2008 at 1:28 pm
I do believe that yellow pages will drive more qualified leads to your site, simple by the nature of their business. You don’t generally visit yellow pages just for the fun of it.
Google will drive more traffic to your site (if you have a decent ranking or a large adwords budget) but there will ineviatbly be a large amount of ‘tyre kickers’ coming your way.
It’s really a matter of analyzing the cost per sale involved over a period of time as to which is the more advantagious route to take. There is probably room for both to work well together depending on the services/products you offer.
January 19th, 2008 at 6:28 am
The fact that people still use Yellow Pages doesn’t mean it isn’t dying though.
They key thing is to retain the confidence of advertisers. If their perception is that “Yellow Pages is dying” they’ll leap ship and move somewhere their advertising will reach their market.
After all didn’t we have that same perception before your post?
July 3rd, 2008 at 2:17 pm
I have run some of my own tests comparing the Yellow Pages on a range of our clients sites to Web Marketing overall. The Yellow Pages website here in SA bring very few visitors compared to Google and a few other bigger local directories. What I compared was the number of leads relative to each other and on average the cost per lead with our target audience B2B SME was 6 times less with on line marketing. Not to say that the Yellow Pages is useless as there are certain industries were the target audience are not web users.
July 21st, 2008 at 2:53 pm
Wow! That is an excellent expiriment. Those are some surprising results. Great job.
July 22nd, 2008 at 6:43 am
The South African statistics are way off from the rest of civilization….LOL….Google traffic accounts for 95%+ of organic traffic to most all of our client websites. Analytics don’t lie! Google rules in South Africa!
August 8th, 2008 at 10:30 am
The experiment is quite interesting. However the amount of those who use yellow pages for search is really impressive.
August 13th, 2008 at 6:29 am
Everyone should also keep in mind that in Canada, YellowPages is a very solid brand (compared to directory popularity in say, South Africa!)
So while Google does send more bulk, you still need to pay attention to other sources of traffic to increase your ROI (if in cpc campaigns).
Traffic to my company’s site coming from MSN and Yahoo organic search is miniscule compared to google, however the quality of traffic has shown to be better than that of Google’s. It is necessary to find a balance of investment from various sources of traffic.
August 14th, 2008 at 4:04 pm
Google is just so easy to use.
It takes too much time to look things up by hand