END OF THE ROAD WITH YELL.COM

END OF THE ROAD WITH YELL.COM

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Discussion

LarsG

Original Poster:

991 posts

74 months

Thursday 12th July 2018
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Finally after 20 years I have decided it is the end of the road for paid advertising with Yell.com formally Yellow Pages.

Having had a number of sponsored listings on their website costing me around £250 a month I was looking at their analytics. Since January, 2300 impressions and 25 clicks to my websites in 7 months. Strangely there was a spike in visits just before the Yell rep contacted me. This works out at around £70 a click on my website.

On the other hand with Google AdWords I get 2800 impressions a week and around 120 visits to my websites. The cost to me here is £50 a month.

I don't know anyone who searches for Yell.com.

Couple that with Facebook and Bing Yell.com looks decidedly rubbish now. Especially as in the summer months I get a huge increase in traffic on Google while traffic on oYell.com is nonexistent.

Who still rates Yell.com?

cptsideways

13,535 posts

251 months

Thursday 12th July 2018
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Good god I wondered if people still paid for that guff, obviously they do!

Monkeylegend

26,226 posts

230 months

Thursday 12th July 2018
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You are at least 10 years to slow in making that decision hehe

t400ble

1,804 posts

120 months

Thursday 12th July 2018
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Just had the last of the Yellow Pages book posted to me this morning

cptsideways

13,535 posts

251 months

Thursday 12th July 2018
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t400ble said:
Just had the last of the Yellow Pages book posted to me this morning
Obviously stuck in the post since 1983 hehe

krisdelta

4,566 posts

200 months

Thursday 12th July 2018
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I had no idea this was still a thing! Yellow pages, that takes me back. Always second rate for finding "stuff" - now, this is PH - what are you going to spend the money you are now "saving", on?

southendpier

5,254 posts

228 months

Thursday 12th July 2018
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but but but but... they have KENSHOO!!!

Sa Calobra

37,010 posts

210 months

Thursday 12th July 2018
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You still use yell?!?!!

Frimley111R

15,537 posts

233 months

Thursday 12th July 2018
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Blimey! Where have you been for 10 years?! Yell.com died years ago thanks to st management. It should have become the equivalent of checkatrade but they didn't see the future and all carried on like lemmings. Thompson local is the same.

red_slr

17,122 posts

188 months

Thursday 12th July 2018
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We used to advertise in 4 books. Dropped the books about 5 years ago. Was on yell.com till last year, was our last year with them we managed to negotiate a large discount. But even with that we had..,,, wait for it....... 1 conversion. Just not worth it.

clockworks

5,292 posts

144 months

Thursday 12th July 2018
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I've been with Yellow Pages for 20 years. Single line entry, used to be free, now just under £40 a year. I get one or two calls a month , either from the paper directory, or a web search. I don't advertise anywhere else (and I don't have a website) as most of my work comes via personal recommendations.

I figured that Yell was costing me less than a fiver per job, so was worth it. I'll give it another year, see how it goes now the paper directory is finished.

Most of my customers are 60+, a lot don't own computers or smart phones.

Frimley111R

15,537 posts

233 months

Thursday 12th July 2018
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Yep, ultimately its all about ROI. For your money it shows it can work.

technodup

7,576 posts

129 months

Thursday 12th July 2018
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Yell/Hibu/Yellow Pages are a joke. Only one step above the Indian mobs who phone promising 'first page of Google sir' for £39.

Slow to move with the times, knocking out diabolical template websites to tradesmen off the back of Yellow Pages' history.

Once this generation of oldies are gone who'll ever even remember them, never mind use them?

rog007

5,748 posts

223 months

Thursday 12th July 2018
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What’s a yell.com?

LarsG

Original Poster:

991 posts

74 months

Thursday 12th July 2018
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I would have given up on Yell a couple of years ago but they kept giving me free entries in the paper directory which is still used by a certain demographic.

Other than Google Bing and Facebook I'm also looking at Checkatrade.

Anyone with experience of this?

Nick928

340 posts

154 months

Friday 20th July 2018
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You need to check more than just call numbers.
I had something similar with Thomson and from numbers alone it appeared to be our second best performing marketing stream.
When I looked at the geographic origin of the calls the initial 80+ incoming calls per month actually turned out to be around five geographically local calls and the rest from Manchester & Liverpool call centres and international calls. Many from the same number.
Explained all of the “buy my st” calls we kept getting.

pleasestopyelling

2 posts

68 months

Saturday 21st July 2018
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Long-term PHer here but posting anonymously.... I worked for Yell for nearly a decade many years ago.

In the first few years customers stuck with the print directory; it worked for a lot of them but the decline was evident by 2008/9. Usually economic downturns were Yell's forté - declining sales meant advertisers upped their spends to fight for business and in previous recessions Yellow Pages was the biggest ad gig in town. But it didn't happen in 08/9 as a print just wasn't the 'go-to' for most people even then, not to mention that ordering an ad today would mean up to a 7-month wait for it to hit doorsteps (and then recycling bins). The directory continued to decline and Yell never got Yell.com right, certainly whilst I was there.

The biggest issue in my view was that they tried to model Yell.com on the print structure rather than making the most of absolute freedom of keywords, search parameters etc. You bought a 'classification' in a 'directory area' and had only a few bullet points in the ad to differentiate from the others. Locations were inflexible (actually useless) They also wanted to sell listing annually up-front (just like the Yellow Pages) - I think a large part of this was because the SAP system at the time wasn't able to deal with so many changes or product lines. It was built to handle orders which didn't change throughout the year and were invoiced for once up front in the cycle. This inflexibility meant that adding, removing or altering Yell.com ad programmes was at best almost impossible and at worst completely impossible. They hacked and bodged it about while I was there but it was never suited to the type of order-processing that would have worked best for customers, users and Yell alike.

Not many people know (or remember) that Yell.com used to drive Google Local search results (there was a 'powered by Yell.com' logo on the Google Local results). Yell got narky about Google making money off its (admittedly very comprehensive) local business information and took their ball home. Yell decided that "...they only did business search and were sticking with it..." Google then did what Google does well and completely rebuilt their business stuff alongside the regular search - if you go to Google to search for info on films, people, songs, recipes, showbiz gossip etc then you'll default to heading there for finding an electrician, a plumber etc... Yell didn't even get a look-in.

So Yell.com refocused on driving Yell.com pages up the organic results, then to buying Adwords - their templated sites were (and I would imagine still are) appallingly bad and terrible value. What was interesting was that many of Yell's traditional print customers had no website or online presence so they built 'free' basic sites which customers could pay to upgrade. The 'free' site actually benefited Yell as much as the customer for links out and in to Yell.com so it wasn't entirely altruistic. Then Yell decided to become an Adwords reseller, but again they shot themselves in the foot by using 'classification'-based keywords which customers couldn't choose themselves - again, this is counterintuitive to the entire point of Adwords! Also the cost was high, the transparency/metrics feedback was as best described as opaque...

The rebrand to Hibu was an expensive and ridiculous waste of time and they brought in a guy to try turn it around whose career history included Polaroid - another name many will remember but never actually buy! The rest is history; the shares tanked from over 600p to less than a penny in five years investors lost huge amounts and Yell rolled over on £800m of debt (of a £2bn debt pile) if I remember correctly.

I really enjoyed my earlier years at Yell - I did very well and they got some things right which had been major issues previously (such as a lack of continuity with account ownership - you'd see a different salesperson every year) and I had customers who told me it worked for them for a long time. However, the rot set in, the 'new media' products were sub-par at best and it all soured very quickly. When I was interviewing for other jobs, people would ask why I was leaving and I'd just ask them when the last time was they picked up a Yellow Pages or sat down and typed in 'Yell.com'. That usually sufficed!

It's a shame in a way as it was, on the whole, a good company to work for and I would do it again if I had the choice but I would leave sooner; I learned a lot and did well but the management failed to see which way the wind was blowing and completely fumbled the ball. Yell.com could've been fantastic if it had visionaries in charge, investment to build a platform which worked, leadership to drive it forward and the flexibility and transparency of feedback to demonstrate to customers what worked and what didn't. Instead it was a less-than-half-arsed attempt to screw revenue from a dying customer base who were already in the process of winding back their print spends.

It's been a long time since I thought about Yell and my time there; I'm genuinely surprised people are still paying to advertise on it as it surely must be almost completely irrelevant to businesses these days.

Edited by pleasestopyelling on Saturday 21st July 15:31

technodup

7,576 posts

129 months

Saturday 21st July 2018
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pleasestopyelling said:
I really enjoyed my earlier years at Yell - I did very well and they got some things right which had been major issues previously (such as a lack of continuity with account ownership - you'd see a different salesperson every year)
My understanding was that Yell and others do/did that deliberately so the customer can't pull the sales guy up on his previous claims that turned to st. laugh

pleasestopyelling

2 posts

68 months

Saturday 21st July 2018
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technodup said:
y understanding was that Yell and others do/did that deliberately so the customer can't pull the sales guy up on his previous claims that turned to st. laugh
I'd imagine there was a degree of that in the older days but it actually came down to something less cynical - salespeople and where they were located.

You'd usually spend 6 months doing your 'home' directory area and the next 6 months doing an 'away' one. If you had people scattered across both areas, it wasn't fair to make someone travel the length of two counties (the books were often carved up by counties) each day to see customers and give someone local accounts in their home town etc and an area 'just inside' the away territory. The first person would be doing mega mileage, the other driving very locally which wasn't fair or productive.

The accounts you were given normally meant you'd have some travel to do regardless of whether you were on home or away directories (I averaged about 20-30k/yr and rarely had customers in my home town or local area for example). If people moved, left or joined, the whole thing had to be recalculated. As I say, they did manage to solve it to a degree, but it was never perfect. Also if people fell behind on the number of accounts they had to see and close, they would have accounts taken away and given to someone who was ahead on visits. It wasn't punishment, purely logistics - if you weren't seeing enough customers early in the 6-month window, you'd simply run out of time to see them as the final booking date got nearer. It would've been chaos and you couldn't have customers not getting a visit. This meant that that account manager wouldn't see the same customer that year in that scenario.

They actually worked quite hard to ensure continuity eventually.

Edited by pleasestopyelling on Saturday 21st July 21:09

Piersman2

6,596 posts

198 months

Saturday 21st July 2018
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I contracted at Yell for a short period back in about 2004 or so, on the SAP side of things.

I remember 2 particular things:
1. I genuinely could not believe how complicated the marketing team there could make selling space in a book to customers. The sheer volume of 'products', which were how much an area of Yellow pages paper was going to cost, was staggering. And all designed to confuse and extract the most cash from the bemused end customer.
2. Yell.com was a 'thing' then albeit still quite young. I used to try and use it to find businesses, etc... , but it seemed berfft of any local hits. And I lived in Reading, the head office location of Yell. laugh

It seemed obvious to me at the time that Yell was on borrowed time, they just didn't seem to understand what was coming and I surprised there's any semblance of Yell still in existence. I thought they went under 10 years ago!