Is Your Yellow Pages Advertising Effective?
How to tell if your Yellow Pages advertising is effective and if you should do it at all
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You can tell if your Yellow Pages advertising is effective when you make more money than you spend on the listing. Sounds easy? Think again.
There are plenty of businesses that still advertise with Yellow Pages. We’re definitely not here to tell you not to – advertising your business is definitely a great idea. More eyes on your business should equal more customers to your business. But with Yellow Pages, things can get a little tricky.
To track your Yellow Pages ad listing and make sure it’s effective, you’ll need a couple tools:
- Google Analytics – It’s the standard on the internet, and you should be using it. Set up a goal for your yellow pages ad.
- A link tracker like Bitly.com – They’re our go-to, you can use branded links (which increase conversion).
- Some form of call tracking link Callfire.com – You’ll need to track the calls from your ad, and you don’t want to ask every single time you get a phone call.
If you’re paying $300 a month (or more) for a listing, you want to make sure it’s helping your business. $300 a month can go a long way for a local business in Facebook advertising, and on Facebook, you can target exactly who you want to target with your ads. So…let’s get started with the set-up.
First, set a goal and plan what you want your customers to do.
You know goals are important to your business, and they’re important to advertising too. Do you really want to spend money that’s not bringing in a return? You could probably figure out a better use for your money, couldn’t you?
Thinking through what you want your customer to do helps you reach the goals you set for your YP ad. Once your goals are set and you know the path you want your customers to take
Thinking through what you want your customer to do helps you reach the goals you set for your YP ad. Once your goals are set and you know the path you want your customers to take
Set Up Your Tools
We start by setting up out Google Analytics, Bitly.com and Callfire. There are tons of other tools you could use, but let’s stick with the basics.
Google Analytics
Hopefully, your website analytics are already set up; but if they’re not, make sure whoever runs your website installs analytics as soon as possible. Next, we’re going to set up a funnel and a goal inside analytics.
Assuming you have a Google Analytics account (if you don’t, sign up for one), sign into your account. You’re going to click into “All Website Data” and look for the tab that says “Admin.” It’ll look like this
Inside the admin section, look for the menu that says “View.” Under that menu, click on the “Goal” link.
Did you make that goal from before? Good, now click “New Goal.” The button should look like this
Now it’s time to set the type of goal. Generally, sticking to destination goals are best for businesses.
Insert the specific web page your customer hits after achieving the specific goal. Thank you pages generally work well – they aren’t reachable from the homepage and customers have to perform specific actions to get to them. Work through all the options:
- How much each new customers is generally worth
- What funnel set up you have to get to your specific “goal page”
Then click continue.
Just a side note, you don’t need to enter your entire URL. You just have to enter what comes after the “.com.” As an example:
Your “goal page” is example.com/thank-you/. That will be your destination page. You’ll set “Equals To” /thank-you/. Now the pages customers need to go through to get to example.com/thank-you/ are:
- example.com
- example.com/contact-us/
The pages customers need to go through to get to your thank you page is called your “Funnel.” Set your funnel steps to, / (for homepage), /contact-us/ (for contact us page) and lastly /thank-you/ for your thank you page. Now you funnel’s set up.
Once your goal is set up in Google Analytics and your funnel’s set up, it’s time to move on to setting up the next tool.
Bitly.com
Bitly is a link tracking tool, and it’s free. Sign up for an account (if you don’t have one already) and create a custom, traceable link for your Yellow Pages profile.
*Side note, for SEO purposes, we strongly recommend your Yellow Pages directory website link is to your homepage, but we’re not here for SEO, we’re here to track our ad spend.
Once your Bitly account is up and running, you’re going to create a link. To create a link, click on the “Create Bitlink” button.
After you do, a sidebar will pop-up. Enter the URL you want to track (homepage or other) into the box called “Paste Long URL.” This will give you a traceable link.
The URL Bitly spits out will be the URL you add to your Yellow Pages “website” box. You’ll know how many times this link is clicked on. From now on, you’re tracking if anything’s happening with your YP ad.
Call Fire
This should be the simplest of the three tools. Sign up for an account, get your phone number (stick with local if your company has only one location) and forward this number to your business’ phone line.
Add this number to your Yellow Pages listing only (you don’t want to skew the data). Call Fire does cost a little money, but after the initial fee, you’re only paying per call – add that cost to your advertising spend with Yellow Pages.
You’re all done with tracking tools.
How To Know If Your Advertising Is Worth It Or Not
Since you’re tracking what’s happening with your add, from now on you’ll know what your Yellow Pages ad is actually doing.
We think it’s a beautiful day when you’re marketing is focused on results; don’t you? Finally, you get to figure out if it’s “worth it” or not.
It’s everyone’s favorite time
Math Time
Money out vs. money in is the simplest way to figure it out. How much are you spending on the advertising compared to how much the ad is bringing in? With all your tracking set up, you’ll know which customers that call, visit your website and become customers are from Yellow Pages.
If you have a Yellow Pages ad, aren’t you in a 1-year contract? Set the tracking up and check on it bi-weekly or monthly until your contract is up for renewal. Then you’ll know if it’s worth it to renew or not. Best of luck!
– Reliably,
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