Now for all of you that must have a great big Yellow Pages Advertisement, here are a few tips from Uncle Peter.
Make sure you take out a bigger advertisement than your competitor. I am sure your local representative will let you know how big you must go.
If you really want to flex your marketing muscles take out a yellow pages online advertisement. I have a client that took out a premium online advertisement with Yellow Pages and I am happy to report they have received 37 link visits for the year (Source Google Analytics). Wow what value!
For those enlightened agents, lets see what you can get for the $10,000 you save by just taking out a little line advertisement in Yellow Pages instead of wasting your money on a big colourful advert that very few people looking to buy and sell real estate read.
* A Yearly Subscription to both Domain.com.au and MyHome or,
* 30,000 visitors to your website through a Google Adwords Campaign or,
* 3 of your Cars Fully Branded with an AutoSkin (yes my brother in law owns this company) or
* A Website Upgrade or
* $10,000 extra in your bank account!
So it pays to think about where you spend your marketing money these days. You want value for money and I am afraid (in my opinion) the Yellow Pages is just so yesterday.
29th August 2007
Hmm.. your a long way from home!
The National Yellow Pages Association and your website http://www.adrevamp.com are both american. Are the statistics you quoted amercian as well? If not, I wonder how well that research crosses over to Australia? I would have thought we have pretty similiar markets but obviously those numbers would be a lot lower.
29th August 2007
Karl,
Interesting point you make and you left Sensis the year I began there.
The Sensis culture of early 2005 to the one where I now find myself in 2007 are like chalk and cheese.
Like any large organisation, the wheels of change turn very slowly, but they turn nonetheless and before change can or will be noticed externally then it has to change from within.
Let me let you all in on a little secret- when I joined Sensis from News Ltd, it was to join the Yellow Online only sales force, because, although I was joining what was a print-centric business, I too believed that an online-only future was the way to go. For the first few months, I dealt only with brand new to Yellow customers or disgruntled former print customers and I leveraged off the same argument that print media of any description might be on the way out. Then, I was promoted to work as as an Online Specialist for existing Print Yellow advertisers and that is when I began to realise exactly how much power those big yellow door-stops and monitor stands still gave to the success of so many businesses.
Like any business who has predicted that the road ahead is rocky and that a downward slope is potentially steep, you have a choice to make- either just keep doing exactly what you have been doing and wind-down until you are extinct, or you look at other ways to remain fresh and relevant and reinvent yourself.
Sensis is in the process of reinventing- clearing out both the mentality and personnel who were (and in some cases still are)of a Public Service Organisation, which, essentially, it still is- public servants=bureaucray=red tape etc etc etc.
Rather than focus on all the that is a problematic, focus on what is still great about the products that the company offers and go from there- such as removing the number crunchers with no people skills from running the ship and putting in very customer-focused individuals who believe (and have proven in similar positions that they have held elsewhere) that if you look after the customers then the bottom line will look after itself, Using the results of ten years worth of (and continuing) analysis of extensive Metered Ad studies to determine what design of advert proves to be the most effective in different classifications, amending, adding or deleting classifications as deemed necessary by the usage patterns derived from these and yellow Online serach results.
I for one am proud to be part of this generational change.
I am not, however, saying to anybody in the Real Estate field that Yellow Pages changing will instantly or even at all change what has happened to how people search for property.I am just asking for you
to be aware that the dinosaur is getting rebuilt from within and is embracing the changes in the media landscape, rather than trying to ignore them, as again, in my opinion, it was doing 5 years- even 3 years ago.
29th August 2007
Elizabeth,
I will forget for a moment that you feel that neither I, my sales colleagues or Sensis do not care about our customers, because nothing could be further from the truth.
I am not giving anybody misleading information- granted, I may have got my sums mixed up at a grand level, but the information I gave you regarding actual searches for Real Estate agents in Melbourne was exact from the Yellow.com.au webserver records and I gave a very conservative estimate of approximate searches in the hard copy based upon the information I have available to me comapring the use of the hard copy and internet Yellow Pages in this city (and as such, as I have been at pains to explain) readliy available from your Account Exec, but seeing as how you have voted with your mouse to not spend money with Sensis anymore, then I don’t expect you to check.
The various advertising medium precentages of searches for Real Estate agents again, are the most up-to-date we have and once more can be sourced for free from your Yellow Account Exec or purchaed from TNS Research.
As for being able to design more effective adverts, for the first time in our history, there is scientifically based and proven data on how to design adverts that work more effectively than if you do not follow these concepts- (and by the way, there is nothing particularly new here, just forgotten by Yellow Pages staff, business owners and Advertising Agencies alike),and every single individual Sensis salesperson, customer service consultant and graphic designer in Australia, has been versed in this now, rather than the older way of doing things which was to take a “best guess” .
It may never get you back Elizabeth, but just know that we are trying, with every fibre of our being to generate tangible results for our customers- sometimes we will fail, but often we succeed.
29th August 2007
Good afternoon
Adrian, tell me how getting statistics off yellowpages.com.au equates to real figures relevent to Yellow Print?
E
29th August 2007
Good afternoon,
In an interesting twist.
Domain appears to be broken this afternoon, I have not been able to check my stock. Nor have the agencies in my area.
However, domain listings on Justlisted appear to be fine. Just not my listings.
Is this the curse of Yellow?
E
29th August 2007
Yellow Fever perhaps…?!
Perhaps the Horsey Flu got them!
29th August 2007
Yellow Dengy Fever
29th August 2007
Elizabeth,
By the available research that I have, in the Melbourne metropolitan area, there are 1.1 million searches per month (Yellow TM Online webserver records) and 3.8 million searches in the Melbourne Yellow Directory (Roy Morgan Single Source Australia) per month.
Bearing in mind that it differs from classification to classification, I take the ACTUAL recorded searches for a heading from Online Server records and multiply it by a little over a factor of 2,to give a rough estimate only, of compatible total hard copy directory searches for the same classification, not by the factor of 3.45 that 3.8 mill divided by 1.1 mill delivers.
29th August 2007
Please indulge me while I digest this – Yellow Pages uses the same company which domain uses, Roy Morgan.
But you tell me that you do not trust Roy Morgan as it is not as accurate as using Log Servers.
So the questions just seem to mount for me.
Should you be using Roy Morgan at all?
Why on earth is domain using roy morgan if roy morgan’s expertise is measuring print? And why use Roy Morgan at all if it is not as accurate as log servers?
There appears to be an over-riding question of how companies measure eyeballs and potentially generate business.
Peter? Glenn?
E
29th August 2007
Ok E, a Number of things. I don’t trust any of the Metrics firms especially when it comes to Print and TV. I think the whole measurement system is just so out of whack with what is going on in the offices, living rooms of Australia.
I am really struggling with Adrian’s assessment. How many people are polled to get these figures? One thousand, two thousand? I know these are taken from a very very minute section (TV and Print) of the community.
I prefer better judgement from people I know (family and business) to make calls on marketing for my company and TV, Print and Radio are simply not even close in the equation.
29th August 2007
Elizabeth, I did not say that I did not trust the Roy Morgan figures- I just deflate them somewhat to give a rough estimate- no different to how (I assume) you give a potential buyer or seller of a property an estimate of the selling price they can expect based upon the info you have at the time
I can confirm absolutely that by the Yellow Online webserver records, there were 161,985 searches made in the Melbourne metropolitan area for Real Estate agents in the period May 06-June 07 (I do have June & July 07 stats available, I just haven’t downloaded them yet)
If anyone cares, I am happy to enquire as to the sample sizes Sensis commission Roy Morgan and TNS to do- bearing in mind they commission these surveys for many classifications every year
As I think Glenn made mention of in an earlier posting, the only true way to judge is to ask every single person who contacts you for any reason how /where they got your phone number, email address, URL,how they found your office if they are a walk-in etc. A lot of work for any business, sure but if you are as full on about demanding ROI from all media as you seem to be here, I don’t see why you would not try.
A rudimentary yet relatively effective way to do this,is to attach a different phone number, email address or landing page on a website to each form of marketing used and track the traffic generated from each- if you have multiple phone lines/ email addresses or multiple pages to a website that is
30th August 2007
E
We know how good he is with Stats… Whats a billion or two !
As has been stated on here many times by a few people and just reinforced by Peter again, do not believe any webstats out there from anyone. Sure some might be telling the truth but web stats are so easy to cheat. There there is the whole question of the validity of the statistics even if the data you are being quoted is accurate. Years ago webstats use to count hits… then page views..then visits..then unique visitors became popular, now session times is becoming trendy with Web 2 gaining momentum. What they all have in common is that none of them give the full story by themselves. There are methods to cheat everyone of those ranking methods and web administrators do what they can to maximise it. You will find more value in trends rather than the data.
As an example a positive improvement to somebodies website traffic might see 30% less visitors but their average page views per visit is increased from 2.3 to 9 and their average session time has increased from 1 minutes to 6 minutes. Less people but far better quality and people are now looking around the site more. These sort of stats might have resulted from removing unrelated search terms in the sites keywords (xxx, porn, free, drugs, teen etc etc) plus an improvement in the navigation structure. Those keywords will bring you visitors but the type of people they attract wont buy a house off you and will soon leave when you have no teens filming porn for a xxx movie that they can download for free whilst taking drugs on your website!!!
The only real accurate thing you can determine from any of it is trends on particular metrics and cross analysing them. For instance a site that has a high number of visitors but a low number of average pages views per visitor could mean its attracting a lot of visitors but they are not viewing much… so maybe its a crap site for instance…. but if that site was a Web 2.0 site using Ajax calls you would expect low pageviews because with web 2.0 the page rarely changes and the data on the page is updated without refreshing the page..
Now lets for instance take just one figure of Adrians recent posts and that is the online searches for melbourne of 1.1million per month. At first glance that sounds impressive doesnt it.. but what about context.. What makes up that 1.1million searches figure. If somebody looks at 4 pages of results, does that count as 4 searches as it does on many other sites as technically clicking the next button or one of the page numbers just triggers a new search and tell it to view the next 10 or 20 responses. How many unique visitors are there…ie.What if the average Yellow pages users does 10 searches a month that reduces the reach down considerably. What if you combine just these two scenarios then your talking about just 26,000 or so people in Melbourne doing 10 searches a month and looking at 4 pages of results. Thats not a very large reach at all. There are plenty of other factors that could also be at play here. How many searchers went away without clicking on an individual advertisers details because their search results display is not very good.
Just remember one thing..if they had a stack of unique visitors you would be hearing about it.. If they could tell you that 700,000 Melbournians used the Yellow Pages online every single month you would have heard about it… Instead they quote you how many searches occurred.
Like much in life look for what is not said, more than what is.. I bet they will not provide click through rates on searches, unique visits, session times and a bunch of other stuff that can all be extracted out of their logs.
Print and TV advertising (or tv ratings for that matter) is even worse. Just like political polls their figures are done by surveying a small sample size and then extrapolating that data to the larger population and coming up with a figure. This is never accurate when its done by third parties but when it is done by the company who benefits from the results the chances of it being really accurate is really slim. They just choose the right people to be in their sample and voila… Huge number at the end. For instance in the last election the polls showed Latham and Labour in with a chance…. and that was done by independent third parties utilising sample data. Look what happened to them!
30th August 2007
Conspiracy Theory Here..
If you owned your own search engine plus had interests in other products would you build into the algorithm for it to highlight any “bad press” for the company or its products and forward that to your PR department so they can put out the fire?
If you worked in the PR department of a big company and you were going to interact on a popular industry blog to put out such a fire would you claim to be just one of the loyal and honest workers rather than the spin doctor you are?
Feasible? Damn yes.
Corporations and PR departments have done much worse in the past. Peter has outed the staff of a number of big company’s on here trying to fake their identities her to give themselves good press or counter bad press. How many get away with it without us knowing?
Why would somebody who works for Yellow pages just happen accross the site right when the topic of Yellow Pages is up for discussion and give us their name and give away that he works in sales on one hand and then on the other, say he would get into big trouble if their PR and Legal departments found out. It would not be too hard to find a Salesperson called Adrian especially now he has told us when he started and the departments he has worked in.
His blind faith in his own statistics even when they were clearly and totally unrealistic is probably a good indicator he hasnt the nouse to be in PR.
Just look at the spin doctor from REA who posts here. Slick and smooth. He glides through it all dropping off info, good news stories and stats like a pro. If it does not go his way or he doesnt want to answer something he just pretends he hasnt seen it even though he responds to posts directly above and below. If the problem gets worse ignore it and dont help it fester even more as it will all be over soon. I actually admire the way he does it… like a pro!
Conspiracy…. Maybe, maybe not.. you be the judge.
30th August 2007
We actually have done a number of Yellow Page ads in Australia and i think i misspoke when i labeled the YPA the “National” Yellow Pages Association. They are now YPA and are definitely international. “The Association has members in 29 countries.” found here: http://www.ypassociation.org/AM/Template.cfm?Section=About_Us
The stats can be found here:
http://www.ypassociation.org/Content/NavigationMenu/Resources/ResearchInstitute/default.htm
On cursory inspection the don’t seem the mention national or international numbers…nice, I know.
On the topic of search statistics being widely manipulated, when we do SEO for clients we try to bake in the fact that some terms that are even moderately competitive can have various search results data inflated simply by the fact that competitors are searching these terms repeditively to assess the results of their SEO efforts, thereby artificially inflating the perceived demand for such key words. whether malicious data skewing occurs is up for debate, but we are firm believers inflation does occur.
30th August 2007
Glenn,
You have confirmed the fact that regardless of what I say you will not believe what I have to say. You criticised me for not backing up my stats, and then, when I did, you criticised that too.
Please let up on the personal attacks- you have an opinion and I have a different one and lets respect that shall we?
Why do I have blind faith in the stats provided to me? Like Peter said, how he prefers to trust the judgement of family and friends in advertising effectiveness?
I have this faith due to the results my customers tell me and prove to me Yellow delivers to them.
30th August 2007
Good Morning,
My goodness there was some activity here last night.
So if I could sum it all up concisely.
Glen, believes the conspiracy theory, that we did not land on the moon.
Adrian says that man DID land on the moon, a total of 1.1million times. But the method he used to count the landings did not involve observing the landings himself.
So my next question is, Who Killed Dianna?
Is Elvis still alive, and did he take the Subway diet?
Will we ever see Michael Jackson black again?
E
30th August 2007
Dianna is alive and well and living in Camden.
Elvis died last year in a freak yachting accident.
Michael Jackson is black its just the camera flashes are way too bright.
MyHome is the number one real estate portal in Australia.
Paris Hilton has found Jesus and he will be appearing in her next online ‘film’.
Beck Hewitt, just wants her privacy.
Kevin Rudd has amazing charisma.
Yellow Pages are going green and will save the environment by directly dumping all print versions in peoples paper only bins and saving them the trouble.
John Howard looks good in a tracksuit.
Hillsong Church members are cool and crazy people.
REA is user friendly and cares about agents first.
Adore Property has not been pushed aside and forgotten about.
Just Listed is revolutionary.
Macquarie Bank have got Executive Salaries ‘about right’.
Real Estate Institutes will hold a press conference and WILL NOT say that a new boom is just around the corner.
George Bush is doubting himself but just needs more time.
CSI have promised not to expand their portfolio.
Telstra are not desperate.
and…………all new real estate sites to be released in the future will NOT call themselves the Google of Real Estate!
30th August 2007
Elizabeth,
Actually I don’t believe the conspiracy theory, for the very reason I stated…. but the coincidences make it interesting don’t you think? We have all been subjected to PR stealth campaigns on here by some companies and the circumstances make you think about it, and I know I am not the only one.
Adrian,
Get over yourself mate. The only things close to a personal attack was when I said
“We know how good he is with Stats… Whats a billion or two !”
and
“His blind faith in his own statistics even when they were clearly and totally unrealistic is probably a good indicator he hasnt the nouse to be in PR.”
The first one was taking the proverbial piss out of you… If you cant take it… bad luck because your stats were billions and billions of dollars out.. FACT.
The second one was only proving your own mistakes probably mean that you are not a blowin here to prop up sensis as a PR exercise. It means I think you probably do believe things you are saying not just being paid to type them.
I dont get upset when you have had made personal attacks at me.. You made the bed… so lie in it, or roll over and get out!
You are quick to claim I made specific statements and retractions in the past (both of which were incorrect) but you have not been so quick to reverse your claims and acknowledge your mistakes. Maybe you should have just said sorry I made a mistake on those things. You didnt… something you chose.. so learn to deal with it.
Peter,
Nice list mate!!! but are you saying some of those things are not real? hehehe
30th August 2007
One of the things about the purely written word is that one cannot often easily tell what the context of the text is beacause one cannot hear the tone in which it is delivered or see the eyes/face/body language of the writer.
Peter’s list for example, is clearly a piss-take.
Some of Glenn’s comments, well maybe it is just me, but the line seemed blurred!
I can take the piss just fine Glenn. You and I will always agree to disagree on this matter and while yes, I admit I may be unable to absolutely prove some of the data presented I also cannot absolutely disprove any of it either.
I defend Yellow pages (and Sensis) because of a passionate belief in the product in a general sense. Sure, for many industries it does not hold the same sway it did 10 years ago but you have never heard me say on here that I think it is THE perfect medium for all industry segments.
And for all of their strange processes and rules, Sensis are a pretty good mob to work for- if they weren’t, well, I would probably try my hand selling real estate instead!
30th August 2007
Well, Adrian, I have been watching and contributing occasionally to this blog for a couple of months. Firstly, I don’t know who Glenn is, but he seems to be a well informed agent who has an analytical mind. I know that may be an oxymoron for an agent and in 95% of cases it probably is. However all the things he says make sense and are backed up by reliable stats. I have a background that didn’t start in Real Estate but has been in real estate for the last couple of decades, and also come from an analytical background.
One thing I am absolutely sure of, is that if you tried your hand in real estate, after you had wasted your money for the first year in the Yellow Pages you would see what Glenn is talking about, and spend it more wisely in the second year. You see it’s one thing to be quoting statistics that nobody believes anymore, and entirely another to put your money where your mouth is. The fact is, we have all done it, we are not talking from inexperience, we are talking from actual, get your hands dirty, spend your money and wonder when the phone is going to ring, try something else, succeed and look back experience.
The public these days are far more educated, far more inclined to want to know all about a property before they see it, and less inclined to ring an agent and ask to be shown a whole swag of properties to confuse them. Once upon a time the agent was the starting point, these days the property is the starting point.
Non specific advertising is a waste of money, and that’s not just my opinion, that’s a fact. It doesn’t matter how much you try to convince yourself that Yellow Pages is the bees knees in advertising– It just isn’t anymore. I am of course talking Real Estate advertising, I would never presume to make such absolute statements about any other industry, because I know very little about other industries. Is that a hint ??????
30th August 2007
Thank you Paul D,
I appreciate the sentiment- can you please let me know where I ever said that Yellow Pages is the “bees knees in advertising?” I am not naive enough to think that and beleieve me- I do not, especially when it comes to advertising in the Real Estate industry.
I don’t pretend to know much about real estate nor have I ever disputed the changing face of how people search for property in the year 2007.
If you can scrape away all the huffing and blowing that has been made and yes, much of it by me, my original bone of contention and the underlying thread of my whole conversation here was that there did seem to be an awful lot of absolute presumption about the Yellow Pages (as indeed there is and continues to be in relation to any form of Print Media, TV, Radio, Outdoor advertising too). In general terms, not specifically for Real Estate advertising.
One thing that I do know that, and I look at my own buying habits for pretty much anything these days as a starting point, is thatmore and more, offline media influences my online search behaviour today whereas 5 years ago it did not, at least not to the same extent I see it doing now.
In keeping with the jovial piss-taking theme of some recent posts was my tongue-in-cheek remark about selling real estate!
16th October 2007
Hi all,
I read the comments from both sides with interest. I am in the IT industry, but have a lot of RE’s as clients and just about all have ditched anything other than a line or small box entry with the Yellow Pages why? cause like I’ve found out in the last 2 years, apart from a small group of industries the Yellow Pages is DEAD.
In my own industry, for years clients have told me that they found me in the YP’s but now particularly in the last six month I have noticed just about all my clients except those who have lost their internet connection now go online and it’s not to YP’s online but to Google, Yahoo and Live etc. Even despite Sensis having a seach engine my website stats show that less than 1 in 200-300 hits on my site come from Sensis.
I spent over $6000 last year on YP’s and almost $700 on Google clicks, yet google has brought in approx. 95% of new business and the work (Gross) that came in from YP’s hasn’t even paid for the ad. So thinking hard and fast with what to do when the YP’s rep turns up in the next 2 months, my decision is to have just a small box focusing on by contact details and getting the internet back on line and a bold small listing in the White Pages for those looking for my business by name.
I’ll focus more on my web presence and focus more on my existing customer base (easier to keep existing customers than get new ones) and be around $5000 richer on the bottom line
15th March 2008
More reasons why the Yellow Page print directories are becoming “dinosaurs”
http://yellowpagethedinosaur.blogspot.com/
15th March 2008
Its been a while since I seen this thread.. I wonder what happened to Adrian..
22nd September 2008
I have often wondered how long it will take for the Yellow Pages to close its doors. It seems the educated consumers are getting more better at doing targeted searches in the search engines to find exactly what they want. This is especially true when it comes to consumers looking for specific product codes, but as you have already said, the printed directory could still be useful to find local trades and services, but the local papers offer that service too.