YP Online Ads Any Good

mplsmm

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Has anyone tried this and had luck? I started one and it turned out the salesguy was so misleading but I asked if I am pretty much stuck and he said yes. But anyway, supposedly I am getting a crap pile of "impressions" but I didn't even know it had started the 1st month. The agency ad is supposed to follow you wherever you go online and keep popping up but I have gotten zilch in calls and just a few clicks. Anyone else have any experience, does it work or did I just get a crappy salesguy? And my "proof" of impressions is an Excel spreadsheet.
 
Has anyone tried this and had luck? I started one and it turned out the salesguy was so misleading but I asked if I am pretty and he said yes. But anyway, supposedly I am getting a crap pile of "impressions" but I didn't even know it had started the 1st month. The agency is supposed to follow you wherever you go online and keep popping up but I have gotten zilch in calls and just a few clicks. Anyone else have any experience, does it work or did I just get a crappy salesguy? And my "proof" of impressions is an Excel spreadsheet.


Sounds like you might have a stalker.:err:
 
The "follow me" is called re-targeting, or re-marketing.

You click on an ad and a cookie is installed in your browser. When you go to another site the ad is supposed to "follow you" and show up again on another site. It won't be the same ad but will be for the same advertiser.

If I look at something on Amazon sometimes I will see an ad for the same product when I switch over to Facebook or other sites. Always from Amazon. Always for the product I researched at Amazon.

Whoever set up your ad didn't do it right. The idea is to get multiple exposures on different sites.

Or maybe you didn't pay them enough to cover the cost of advertising on multiple sites.

You rarely want to pay for impressions, only for clicks.
 
It's supposed to be on tons of sites, but with only an excel spreadsheet, how on earth do you track it? It's yp the yellow pages and it's supposed to be their new digital program. But I am supposed to be getting 75k local impressions a month, I just wondered if anyone else had tried it. I don't know if it's decent and the guy is such a jerk, I am over thinking it.
 
@goillini52 LOL. Nice editing.

I got burned with YP both online and off. Unless things have changed, I would say avoid them like the drunk guy at a baseball game.

About 10 years ago, I spent $1,000 a month to be in the print YP and got only a half dozen clients for the whole year from that source.

When I did their online version, they wouldn't tell me where I could see my ad online and gave me no meaningful metrics. When I found my ad on my own and wanted to make changes to it, they wouldn't let me and wouldn't even confirm that it was my ad. The ad copy was lousy and it linked to my home page. (I knew it was my ad by default, I had written all my other online ads, none of which linked to my home page.)

The yellow pages is making money off their name and formerly well-deserved reputation. It was the place to be in the year 20 BI. (Twenty years before iPhones.)

Radio didn't kill newspapers. TV didn't kill radio. But the Internet has most newspapers down for the count or worse and turned the physical Yellow Pages into a corpse so lifeless that it is no longer attractive even to worms.

But why YP hasn't figured out the digital world is beyond me. I'm sure they had the resources to do it right, but they didn't.

My guess is that because of their name recognition they were and perhaps still are "successful" in that they were able to sell their useless ads to business owners like myself who relied on old data. Maybe they had/have no incentive to make their ads actually work for their advertisers.
 
A friend sold YP ads a few years ago. Very lucrative for him. Lousy for most of the people that paid for ads.

They do trade on their name and take advantage of people who remember how useful the YP were . . . before Al Gore invented the internet.

YP isn't the only one who fails to understand how online advertising works. You can say the same for most print media.

And you probably are not going to be able to get out of your ad contract. The reps job is to sell you on buying a pig in a poke, not how to make money from your investment.
 
I get great ROI from remarketing. However, remarketing only works if your website has traffic already.

Remarketing, aka retargeting, brings people back to your site who have been "cookied" when they visited your site. Google, FB, Bing and some smaller players have programs. (FB lets you upload a list of phone numbers or email addresses, cookies are recommended but not required)
 
OK, here is my post that I hope will help other forum members not make the YP Mistake I did.

In my 2nd year of business I built a WIX website geared to all forms of Life & Health Insurance. WIX gave me a number of companies to link to to generate traffic to my new site , YP was one of them. Shortly after linking, I get a "fast pace" phone call from a YP sales guy on a late Friday afternoon. For a $100 bucks a month they could generate a lot of interest for me like other insurance companies YP worked with. I figure, what the heck, I'll try it for a few months and see what comes of it -- its not a big risk. But I was fidgety about the call, I never do something like this without research....

So after hanging up, I google YP advertising and the complaints were out the roof, thousands. I immediately pick the phone up and realize, I have no phone number. I quickly went to their web site, no contact number to be found. I figure, if they send an invoice I'll simply return it and opt out... WRONG!

Next Tuesday, I receive an invoice for nearly $4,000.00 for 3 years of advertising. Again, no phone number, only a return remittance address. I wrote on the invoice in big black marker, NO & CANCEL!. Same day, I get a call from a YP Independent agent trying to sell me the same service and I get a contact name and number -- I call and after an hour of run-arounds, I get some a**hole that says you agreed to a 3 year term and we are holding you to it!. I tell him the only way I'll pay it is for a judge to make me... and I hung up.

Fast forward to today, after 12 months of their invoicing me and my returning every invoice unopened with a big fat NO! on each one, the collection agencies start calling.... and they have continued to call for the last 2 years, I ignore the calls.

I'll let you folks know if this ever gets to court.. but for now... heed my warning and stay away from YP Advertising. These people are crooks.
 
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