For many years Yellow Pages had an interesting, if not pole, position in marketing performance reports. Whilst many communication and media channels would deliver a cost per sale of £X, the Yellow Pages always topped the report, often with a CPS of a 10th of £X - or even less.

Why did it do so well? Not because it had any magical qualities as an advertising medium but because it because it was the first calling point for many consumers wanting to find out more about an advertised product. When calling a call centre, the operative might ask, “And where did you hear about AB Financial services?” to which the caller would respond, “In the Yellow Pages”. This Yellow Pages source would then be duly logged in the call data for future agency evaluation. Let’s call this “Yellow Pages Syndrome”

Google is now increasingly performing this “first port of call” function in marketing activity, particularly in non-retail services marketing. The result is that when brand terms are measured in pay per click campaigns they can perform extremely well. Conversions on PPC brand search terms for product X can come in at less than 10% of the cost per conversion on generic category terms. Think “Atco lawnmowers” versus the generic “lawnmowers” for example. “Atco lawnmowers” may deliver a cost per conversion of less than £10, whilst the generic “lawnmowers” may produce a cost per conversion several times higher.

Informed marketers always knew that Yellow Pages was only the “receptacle for response” not the originator of the response itself. The problem was that Yellow Pages was very difficult to measure, all we had to go on was the circulation or distribution volumes in each book’s catchment area. This figure was flat over the whole year and no daily or seasonal readership reporting was available. As a result is was almost impossible to form robust causal linkages between advertising activity and Yellow Pages response. But Google’s daily level reporting across all purchased PPC terms including factors such as response, conversion and key page visits (through Google analytics) means that we have enough data variation to examine those linkages. And, lo and behold, the data clearly supports the idea that advertising drives brand searches.

The fact that advertising and direct marketing drive Google brand term searches means they now have a new metric against which they can be judged. Advertising and direct marketing that produces Google searches can be driving some of the lowest cost sales a business is likely to make - -provided Google searches driven by these channels are correctly attributed. So whilst online and offline, Google and other techniques may appear to be competing against each other, they are in fact enjoying a harmonious and synergistic relationship.