Yellow Pages advertising and ad sources

[FPK]

From experience I've always been telling clients of mine to stay from Yellow Pages advertising. It has been several years now and it seems that Yellow Pages not only offers just priority listings but also SEO and their own version of Adwords it seems.

I received a call from a Yellow Pages sales rep today saying they can promise me 50k impression views for $500/month which is a campaign managed by them and they'll even create the ads as well. When I questioned them on their 9 million sources they have for generating these impressions, if these impressions are local or national they mentioned it works like Adsense in a way. I eventually declined their offer and figured I'd do some research.

If I were to create an Adwords Display campaign with that kinda of budget and do it locally by my city, Adwords forecasts are no where near that kind of impression count, expanding the campaign out to all of Ontario would be closer but still not quite that high an impression count. I'm assuming YP doesn't have as large of a network compared to Google either which also makes me more doubtful.

What I would really like to know is has anyone had any success with YP advertising compared to Adwords recently especially with their high costs for such services? And does anyone know where exactly YP, Google Adwords, Bing Ads get their web partners and sources from? I know there are ad revenue agencies like Metroland that sell their ad sources to such companies and was curious.

[troy.evans]

Hello!

While I haven't had any direct experience with a YP ad I would have to agree with your concerns when faced with such a high impression promise and vague supply source information. I would suggest trying to work with the YP representative to learn more about what sort of analytic data you would receive on the YP side.

From what you've mentioned it sounds like you are more interested in only receiving local traffic. If this is the case and you're curious about seeing what YP can offer you might want to try out their local search ads which is much less expensive at around $60/month.

Sorry I couldn't offer more information, I hope this is helpful!