Category: Curated

A client approached me today and asked whether or not I thought it would be a good thing for her to advertise in the Yellow Pages. I said I dunno — let’s look at the numbers…

Over the past 13 months, her Yellow Pages campaign had generated 5,500 impressions and a little over 60 clicks. In one year. Perhaps the thing that amazes me most about that is that our county tends to lag behind a little technology-wise and you would think the Yellow Pages would still be popular here. Perhaps even our humble county is falling prey to this national trend….

The White Pages, where many of us have found residential phone numbers over the years, are slowly being phased out in a number of states. NPR reported on this in early October, and now New York is part of the movement, too.

There will still be Yellow Pages, for the time being — it’s just the residential listings that phone companies are seeking permission to stop printing, except for customers who specifically request them. Everything from environmental concerns to the ubiquity of online directories to the decline of land lines has added heft to the cause, and in a growing list of states, you already won’t get the White Pages automatically.

But the piece in The Wall Street Journal notes that where AT&T has stopped printing the White Pages automatically, 2 percent of customers still request them. It’s not a lot, but it’s something.

It’s not hard to imagine a day when the Yellow Pages, too, will no longer be able to justify their existence, and the entire concept of a hard-copy phone directory will be something almost nobody remembers and almost nobody can imagine using.

Now let’s take a look at Facebook ads. Here’s the report summary for a little campaign I did a few weeks ago…

In brief, for a cost of $20.92, my ‘facebook ad using’ client got 25 times more impressions, almost the same amount of clicks, in a much more targeted audience than my ‘yellow page using’ client got in the previous 13 months for less than %1 of the cost. Oh — I forgot to mention the first client spent $3,900 to get her 60+ clicks…

I don’t know — you tell me. Should client #1 continue to use Yellow Pages or test the waters on Facebook Ads? I think even I can figure that one out…