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My thought for the day, depending on the size of your ad do yellow pages have a set price for advertising throughout the UK or does it change in relation to your area.
For instance I have placed a 1/4 column one colour ad in my local yel under washing machines – spares & repairs total cost including art work, vat £642:73.
How does this compare with your same type ad in your area, if it is more or even better less could we combine forces to get costs down, just a thought on a driech day in the glens.
silverbroomRe: Yellow Pages
I called YP about this about three years ago IIRC.
Are you ready for the shocker….
National cover advertising starts at £100,000!
Apart from which I think many of us have simply given up advertising in YP as we found it a waste of time, of course that won’t be true for everyone but it did appear to be the general sentiment.
Oh and YP and Yell have never yet in my experience, lived up to what they promised.
K.
Re: Yellow Pages
silverbroom wrote:My thought for the day, depending on the size of your ad do yellow pages have a set price for advertising throughout the UK or does it change in relation to your area.
I think costs do vary from area to area depending on the circulation and size of area.
silverbroom wrote:For instance I have placed a 1/4 column one colour ad in my local yel under washing machines – spares & repairs total cost including art work, vat £642:73.
That is the same cost as me and if you break that down to £12:36 per week , I reckon it’s the best and most cost effective form of advertising there is.
The reputation of yellow pages also seems to vary around the country but for me it seems to attract mostly decent customers :D.
HTH
Bryan
Re: Yellow Pages
My area is covered by 4 directories, and I only advertise in one being the central one where we are based. I have proved that we get a similar level of chargeable calls in the areas I am not listed. That is one nail in their coffin
I stopped and looked at my spend, and it was approx £6k p.a. for that one phone book. That is £120 per week, and I would need a minimum of 15 calls generated in that one area that were profitable in the first place in order to justify the spend, the train of thought being that £8 of the profit (if any) on those calls will pay towards the advert. Every other chargeable call would then be a bonus. Bearing in mind I only need to look at the area of Y/Pages as covered, the other 3 areas I’m getting the work for free.
Then I factored the fact that I get nearly as many calls in the periphery of my area, being the 3 phone book areas, and I thought why bother. If I lose 10 of those calls that I have to use to subsidise the advert, I’m still better off.
I had a rep from Yellow Pages in last week, and he could not defend his case. I’m sticking with Yell.com and a free one line & that is it! He suggested I was nuts.
I run spread sheets for my major accounts, and keep a running percentage total of the ratio of chargeable work over the rest of the business. I let him see my current accumulative figure being at just over 22{e5d1b7155a01ef1f3b9c9968eaba33524ee81600d00d4be2b4d93ac2e58cec2d}. on chargeable calls. I have confidently told him next year any difference will be minimal, and if not I’m confident any drop will be less than the money I’ve been spending. Not only that, in common with other Yellow Pages “Business Executive Advisors” he will have moved on.
Alex
Re: Yellow Pages
Dread the yearly visit from yellows rep, always a new face every year, always the same high pressure bull. Wish i had nerve to drop it but i think it at least pays for itself.. just. Word of mouth is & always will be the best though, & its free of course. Only good thing about yellows is that the price hasnt been allowed to increase for a few years now due to their almost monopoly position, i think thats been lifted now tho. Not a company i take pleasure from dealing with, mainly cos o the pushy reps …(sorry, executive sales executives) :rolls:
Re: Yellow Pages
silverbroom wrote: For instance I have placed a 1/4 column one colour ad in my local yel under washing machines – spares & repairs total cost including art work, vat £642:73.
My local area split over 2 directories. One has a circulation of 191,000 homes costing £767.27 (1/4 column – Incl VAT & artwork). The other a circulation of 101,000 costing £658.00 inclusive VAT & artwork for another 1/4 column. 😯
HTH?
Re: Yellow Pages
For the last few years me and the good lady were not convinced that we were getting value for money with our YP Advertising and suggested as much to the Rep.
He was so cock sure of himself that he suggested that they could use an exclusive Tel number in our advetisment that would be directed to our normal Tel number and they would even give us monthly figures of the number of people using that exclusive number completely FOC.
I thought it strange that we never got these figures. So when the guy called for his next appointment to pick up his annual fee, I told him not to bother calling without the promised stats.
When he came the figures worked out at less than 10{e5d1b7155a01ef1f3b9c9968eaba33524ee81600d00d4be2b4d93ac2e58cec2d} of my customers for that year, yet YP cost’s accounted for more than 20{e5d1b7155a01ef1f3b9c9968eaba33524ee81600d00d4be2b4d93ac2e58cec2d} of our annual profitt margin.
I told him as a result of this we would not be continuing with the advertising, to which he replied that he was ‘Gob smacked’ to think we would not be carrying on. I replied that if he couldn’t work those figures out himself as being non viable, then his Gob needed smacking.
Sean
Let me just ask something…
How many of you actually use YP to find anything now and how many of you haven’t seen sight of a YP book since you stuck it in the cupboard the last time it was delivered beside the phone book?
K.
Re: Yellow Pages
I must admit that when I require a local trade I refer to the YP, I also make use of Yell.com. This is from a personal standpoint of course !
Now we find that a lot of customers do find us in YP as the area we trade in is highly populated with an abudance of new developments and people moving into the area. These people would not know of us as many of them are not local people. These people use YP and Yell.Com to find traders like us.
Is it worth the cost ? thats difficult to say, often I think that I will do a year without any YP and see what happens, thats a brave step but perhaps necx year I may just go with Yell.com and loose the YP as an experiment.
The YP reps are pushy but I don;t let them push me, I take out exactly what I want based on what I find works for us. I think that the Yell reps are swapped by mandate each year as we to never see the same one back.
The new guy this year came in saying he wanted to understand my business and where we wanted to be by this time next year, he said that he could desgin a new ad that would out us ahead of our compeditors and bring in more money !
Well being the skeptic that I am I agreed to let him try his ideas, after two weeks a proof arived that was laughable, When he came back I told him what I thought about his idea, he said that he would get it re-designed. Three weeks later a second proof arrived which was no better than the first.
I called the rep and advised him that he cold forget the idea he had and reverted back to my own ideas at a far cheaper cost.
Seriously they are under pressure to get the sales up and to say they want to understand your business and make the advertising work is a joke. At the end of the day you have to make your own choice based on your own financial position and commn sense and forget what they say.
When we did use Yell.com they came armed with figures after a year that bore no relation to my own stats. We run and host our own website and servers so I am in the position of being able to raise my own detailed stats. The Yell rep did’nt know what to say but after a lengthy enquiry it transpired that Yell do not raise the stats themselves ! they are colated by a third party !
Any stats they show you could be inaccurate as in our case and they promised that they would sort it out. We have never had a resolution to the issue and therefore I would not trust what they say.
Re: Yellow Pages
Del wrote:
He was so cock sure of himself that he suggested that they could use an exclusive Tel number in our advetisment that would be directed to our normal Tel number and they would even give us monthly figures of the number of people using that exclusive number completely FOC.Hi Sean
Is this exclusive number a normal number or some fancy 0845/0870 etc. number because I reckon the customers who turn to Yellow pages are looking for local telephone numbers that they recognise.
Without the local number I reckon many potential customers would just skip by the advert regardless of a local address.Bryan
Re: Yellow Pages
Yellow Pages does have a great deal of clout in giving new business to each and everyone of us, though it’s very hard to quantify and difficult to monitor. So many factors too in the size, placement and wording the ad must have in order to attract new custom.
My ad in the YP this year has been fobbed off at the back of the listing and I’ve ranted many a time in other threads about this ludicrous situation of AAAAAAA 1st Call Services and all the other claptrap YP get up to in order to squeeze as much off each advertiser then shoehorn their ads in each publication. :rolls:
I’m well miffed about anything to do with YP and the exhorbitant money I shell out each month on Direct Debit to them. But nevertheless it brings in a steady trickle of new business for me still to justify the outlay and to stand alongside my competitors year in year out.
You may be interested to know that of the 5 jobs I had today 2 were new customers. And with this thread running it crossed my mind to ask one new customer where she heard of me? You guessed it already 😉 …. “I found you in Yellow Pages!”
So today at least 20{e5d1b7155a01ef1f3b9c9968eaba33524ee81600d00d4be2b4d93ac2e58cec2d} of my income has come directly from YP :rotl:
The other new customer incidentally came from……Repairs@…..Oh Yes! :tup:
Re: Yellow Pages
that is exactly why i said no to it
most people phone on there mobile as the call is free but not if its an 0870/0845 no
and so as stated would look to the local numberRe: Yellow Pages
because I reckon the customers who turn to Yellow pages are looking for local telephone numbers that they recognise.
Without the local number I reckon many potential customers would just skip by the advert regardless of a local address.
Couldn’t agree more Bryan. I have never gone with the 08 numbers due to the fact that i know people want to see a local phone number.I recently moved to an area which I have advertised in before but with a not so local phone number code. This year I have advertised in the same book but with a local code and my work hasn’t increased dramatically.
My advertising with YP cost me £40 per week. So as long as i get 2 jobs a week from it I have covered my costs. I approximately get 4 to 8 jobs a week from YP. Money well spent me thinks.
Re: Yellow Pages
Bryan wrote:
Hi Sean
Is this exclusive number a normal number or some fancy 0845/0870 etc. number because I reckon the customers who turn to Yellow pages are looking for local telephone numbers that they recognise.
Without the local number I reckon many potential customers would just skip by the advert regardless of a local address.Bryan
To be fair Bryan, We have been in bussiness since October 1989 and our business is well established in our given service area. We have advertised in every edition of our local YP since that year till last.
The survey was the Rep’s idea not mine. If he felt there would have been a significant downturn in calls due to the number change for that year, he would surely have factored this in, before suggesting it. After all the object of the exercise was to specifically quantify the sales enquiries, coming in from our YP advertising.
The number he gave us was an 0845 number which is local rate and a fair proportion of trades utilise these numbers when their service is spread over different STD codes, as ours is.
There has been no great decernable drop off in customers since cancelling with YP and I’m only sorry I didn’t do it sooner.
Sean
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