For disclosure I think its important to get out that I use to work for the Yellowpages Group when they purchased Autotrader.ca. It was with some humour today that I got a call from the local Yellowpages rep about a free business listing for Refresh Partners.

YPG ( Yellowpages Group ) sells advertising as a print and online bundle with an annual commitment that his billed monthly. The directory is also divided regionally, and Toronto for example has 4 different books we’d need to purchase for print ads for coverage.

This is the beginning of the problem with Yellowpages advertising. Refresh Partners focuses on marketing in social networks, which is most cases is Facebook Marketing. I would only want Yellowpages.ca advertising related to “Facebook Marketing” keywords. Similar to what we purchase with Google.ca.

The Yellowpages pricing starts at $64/month for 3 lines in the print directory and matching keywords online. There is no option to purchase the online keywords only, or to purchase keywords on a CPC basis. Yellowpages.ca also offers a web line to Refresh.ca for $70/month but a great bargain for just a link…

Yellowpages.ca also back fills their search listings from Google.ca. This means that since nobody is currently purchasing ‘Facebook Marketing’ keywords, Yellowpages.ca displays the Google.ca listings. In effect we get full exposure for our Google.ca ad spend on Yellowpages.ca today. A quick check of my Google.ca adword reports shows no impressions coming from Yellowpages.ca. So nobody is searching Yellowpages.ca for “Facebook Marketing”, we can ignore Yellowpages.ca as an ad channel…

The other interesting problem with Yellowpages.ca is that we’ve had our business lines for about 6 months now. The YPG ad sales process is annual so Yellowpages.ca listings generally only get updated annually.

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