Internet Yellow Pages, City Guides and Comparison Shopping Search Engines
Up until very recently, pay advertising on internet yellow page and or city guide types of websites, were not considered by most small-to-medium sized businesses to be the best of choices. However, with the strong move by some Internet yellow page properties to produce much larger, more robust entities, Internet yellow pages (or IYPs) have become much larger players in the online advertising market.
There are many aspects to this that involve local search. Yellow page directories have realized that many businesses will pay for an ad in a yellow page directory online in addition to (or even instead of) the print version, because they realize research is showing an increasing trend of not just users, but buyers, using the online version of the yellow pages to find a local company to buy from.
Another part of the puzzle is that many businesses are instituting policies where they no longer supply their employees each with a print version of the yellow pages, for various reasons, and instead encourage online access when an employee would have previously used the print version of the yellow and white pages, keeping just a few print copies around in central areas.
In response to this trend, yellow pages companies have become even more cognizant of the fact that more users may be accessing online versions of the yellow/white pages while at work. Therefore, if they are allowed to use their computers on lunch to do personal errands, they may be “shopping” for an item from a business in a certain location online that they will then later purchase either on their way home or at least will have researched locations.
Obviously, many other scenarios are leading to increased usage of online yellow/white pages as well as other online types of local-related guides to products/services (such as city directories, community directories, local business web rings, shopping comparison sites, etc.) that a consumer may not have otherwise consulted.
From this, internet yellow page companies, as they began to partner with online search engines to provide them with their databases to ensure up-to-date listings and changed listings are quickly integrated into searches, realized they themselves could sell the equivalent of PPC ads inside their online yellow page sites, in addition to online traditional advertising.
The next logical step was for search engines and yellow page companies to either further their integration or to continue to compete against each other for the ad budgets of business owners. Each side has already developed parts to the puzzle, but neither had the full process developed.
These arrangements are still in the process of being finalized and some have not yet announced that intentions or negotiations are in process. Each side realizes the other’s strengths – proven online customer reach and existing PPC programs in place on the search engines (for example, Google’s name recognition and its listing as most popular search engine) with yellow page companies’ proven print reach and their known increasing online use by potential customers. Right now the situation appears to be leaning towards consolidation and furthering partnerships between the search engines and Internet yellow page and directory-style paid listings.
Some of the larger web directories, regional directories, and smaller search engines that may or may not have previously offered PPC ads that are involved in such partnerships include sites such as PremierGuide, On-line USA, MyePages, StepUp.com (all now partnered with ePilot’s parent company Interchange), LookSmart’s LookListings, among others.
IYPs themselves who have included a PPC type model into their websites include CitySearch, Switchboard, and SuperPages, among others. Shopping comparison sites are also early adopters of this hybrid, including sites such as BizRate (Shopzilla), NexTag, Shopping.com, etc.
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