Comments on: For Yellow Pages isn’t proof better than research?

By: Simple Product, Flat Fee, Proven Performance « Predicting What Consumers Want to Buy

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 17:43:07 +0000

[...] but you do know how well it’s performing and can choose to carry on or not. As I’ve written before, all forms of advertising should be tracked – including print media. Imagine a small [...]

By: Dave Hucker

Dave Hucker — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 21:03:49 +0000

heh… In a perfect world we’d be tracking everything, but like you said, its an education process. Invariably many see their advertising budget as a ‘spend’ instead of an ‘investment’ and the potential ROI from various spaces (print,IYP,SEM, Local Search, etc.) sometimes gets lost in the mix.

I enjoyed immensely the QA session with the National Advertisers. It refreshed my insight into the mind of the marketing director; what they know, don’t know, think they know about their vertical and what I know their competitors are doing in the same space and the varying differences in between. I’m grateful for them opening up some of their processes to us and putting themselves on the line in front of a crowd. Although I have to admit, I did visibly recoil when I heard a couple of them admitting they’re not using PPC right now to drive sales when its a proven commodity for their competitors..

cheers

By: predictabuy

predictabuy — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 20:41:15 +0000

Thanks for joining in Dave. I agree that meaningfully presented statistics provide a great opportunity to stay engaged with your customer – and make sure they understand the value you’re delivering to them!

As a CMR do you set-up tracking for everything? That is, do you set up tracking numbers for all internet and print media? Is this something your customers have come to expect or is it an education process?

Thanks,
Eric

By: Dave Hucker

Dave Hucker — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 20:27:19 +0000

I agree with you also Larry. As Katie Donovan (SEMPO institute) emphasised at the YPA conference , we should be not only offering these statistics to customers, we should sit down once a quarterly to analyze these stats for them.

We’re a CMR and we employ click tracking technology and tie it to a dynamic telephone number so we can give the client a higher degree of insight into just where their leads are coming from on the Internet.

All in all it was a pretty good conference, although I’d have liked the blogger part to have been more in depth.

By: Larry Small

Larry Small — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 17:53:31 +0000

I absolutely agree with you on that point, Eric

By: predictabuy

predictabuy — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 16:40:10 +0000

Thanks Larry. I agree this data is very important to the value story — advertisers rightly love the proven ROI of Yellow Page advertising. And, yes, I’m glossing over the technical challenges of tracking everything. But I think it’s both possible and more importantly the right goal for the industry. You really can’t have too much data on how advertisers benefit from your product!

I really see it as building on and leveraging a strength of Yellow Page publishers.

Thanks,
Eric

By: Larry Small

Larry Small — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 16:27:58 +0000

You have a good point, Eric. Yellow Pages is a very trackable medium. In fact we currently have over 160,000 metered ad tests. However, it would be extremely difficult to track the ads of all 3 million current Yellow Pages advertisers, not to mention potential advertisers. So for this reason, data on reach, frequency, demographics, etc. is very important to explain the Yellow Pages value story to advertisers.