Are Yellow Pages Toast? Four Years Later We Review Ad Value

In 2007, I took some heat for pointing out that Google Trends showed declining searches for “yellow pages” while theorizing that this indicated reducing consumer interest in print and online YP sites. About four years later, we can now look back and see whether this turned out to be a valid prediction, and also reflect on what value YP may still have for advertisers.

When I wrote that earlier article, I was aware that connecting a major shift in overall consumer behavior to a graphed trendline of searches in Google was a little loose in terms of causality.

There are many reasons why people search for a particular phrase, and many reasons why cumulative searches for the phrase can rise or fall. (Not to mention, there is uncertainty about what the actual volume of searches is in the graphs since Google obscures volume amounts, and there can be error in assuming that Google users reflect the same search patterns of users who may search elsewhere, such as in Bing.)

I had some basis for believing the Google Trends numbers back then, and for associating them with overall consumer behavior connected to “Yellow Pages” as well as for a number of other types of searches for businesses. I had worked for some years for Verizon’s online YP site, Superpages.com, overseeing analytics, among other things, and Superpages had occupied the top search result in Google for searches for “Yellow Pages” for quite a number of years.

The clickthrough rate for “yellow pages” searches was a large enough volume with enough consistency to see a correlation with the graphed line in Google Trends, and with some directory usage indicators. Google Trends also showed expectable seasonal spikes for various industries, and rises and declines in cumulative interest in topics (which is the basis for Google Zeitgeist which is also often cited as a pulse indicator for rises and drops in popularity).

So, when I saw the clearly-declining trend line for YP searches back then, it was concerning to me, and it seemed highly likely that the cause probably was that Google Maps (and other local search engines ) were having an impact on both print and online YP usage.

Users searching for “yellow pages” in Google were typically trying to find one of two things — they were either trying to find the Web address of their local yellow pages in order to conduct business searches online, or they were trying to find contact information for their YP company (either to order a phone book or to advertise in the yellow pages).

The drop in these searches appeared significant enough to reflect some major shift in consumer behavior — if those consumers weren’t trying to find a YP site to use, or a YP company from which to obtain a phone book, then they must be getting business info elsewhere.

Source: http://searchengineland.com/are-yellow-pages-toast-four-years-later-we-review-ad-value-116199

Note:

Delta Ray is experienced web scraping consultant and writes articles on Yelp Data Scraping, Linkedin Profile Scraping, Yellowpages Data Scraping, eBay Product Scraping, Amazon Product Scraping, Tripadvisor Data Scraping, Linkedin Email Scraping, Screen Scraping Services, Yelp Review Scraping and yellowpages data scraping.