Most of the time when discussions arise about yellow pages advertisers shifting from print to online, the talk is in generalities. But not all markets are the same. Certainly, some have shifted online in greater numbers than others.
An Oregon search marketing company seeks to aid companies in managing their yellow pages across different markets with a new analytics tool.
G5 Search Marketing today launched their Yellow Pages Analytics Tool, which is added to their Local Marketing Platform. The tool provides analysis showing how many customers would be lost by cutting print yellow pages or offset by engaging an online campaign.
“We have clients looking to cut millions of dollars per year in print yellow page advertising,” said G5 CEO Dan Hobin. “The issue becomes when to cut as you don’t want to cut too soon. For businesses with multiple locations, every market is different. Our tool enables our clients to cut advertising in major metros while keeping the smaller markets where yellow pages still perform.”
Projections from Borrell Associates have local advertisers shifting $13.1 billion to online advertising from various offline media. A look at average CPMs explains why. The average internet CPM is $3.65 while the average yellow pages CPM is $9.29.
What do you think about this new tool? Let us know in the comments.
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Top 10 Yellow Pages Searches According to Yellow Pages Association

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Yesterday Kevin Heisler and I spoke with Chad Baldwin, a product manager at Coremetrics. We learned about the announcement being made by Coremetrics today. There is some very interesting stuff in this announcement.
For those of you who are heavy into PPC, you may also be used to treating your campaigns in a direct response model. Someone came in by clicking on your ad after searching on a particular keyword within a search engine. So did they convert? Did enough convert to justify the cost for the keyword?
But the world has changed, and dramatically so. More and more purchases are being made only after multiple visits, and multiple purchases. A classic sequence of searches may be “digital camera”, followed by “Sony digital camera”, followed by “Sony cyber-shot DSC-W70″. Only after that 3rd search did the customer in this example finally purchase.
One of the clasic bid management problems has been that we have always provided all the credit to the last click (in this case Sony cyber-shot DSC-W70). However, if the user came to your site for all 3 of these searches, surely some credit should go to the earlier searches. Yet classic web analytics packages and bid management systems don’t allow you to handle this.
How this hurts you in your PPC campaigns is that your bid management solution might tell you to turn off that broad keyword (digital camera) because it is not profitable in a direct response model. But, […] Read more »

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Yahoo has acquired IndexTools, a leading web analytics company. For another take on this, check out Eric Peterson’s post on the topic. As Eric notes, one of the interesting things about this is that IndexTools is a tool that arguably has the power of the top tier tools (see my review of IndexTools here), but has been offered traditionally at a much lower price point.
However, IndexTools has been slow to gain broad market exposure due to its headquarters location in Hungary. But now that has changed in a fundamental way. Yahoo can bring a new level of visibility to IndexTools, and could quite possibly take the E-Business edition of IndexTools away as a free product. Such a move would put a powerful stake in the ground in competition with Google Analytics and Microsoft’s Gatineau solution. You can also imagine what will happen when the IndexTools Enterprise edition gets pushed through Yahoo’s sales channels.
So congratulations to Dennis Mortensen and his team. I have gotten to know the IndexTools team quite well over the past year, and they truly have earned this new opportunity.

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I’m constantly on the lookout for software tools and services that help us serve our clients better. Since I’ve been a closet geek and software junkie my entire life, I get a mild kick when I come across software that’s well-designed and provides value and features that really stand out. Yesterday I was tipped off to one that almost literally knocked me out of my chair.
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Imagine the unbridled joy last night as RSS publishers went to bed absolutely giddy over massive boosts in RSS subscriptions to their website or blog. Too bad it wasn’t real. RSS feeds are a critical measure of website’s popularity and the impact of marketing. An increasing feed subscription count can be a key metric, speaking to the success of search marketing efforts-or not.
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