Yell.com has a service which is confusing

By Laurence Dunn on 29th November 2018

Yell.com has a service which is confusing

Like many others on here, I’ve paid Yell or Yellow Pages in the past to help get me Sales Leads for my business (Marketing Consultant). My name is Laurence Dunn MCIM, Chartered Institute of Marketing member since 2007. I thought the latest Yell.com “Online Business Directory?” offering was a good deal! My contract was duly taken out for around £600 in March 2018 and was for 12 months. I used their web system and optimised the entry as I was advised to by the Yell Consultant who sat with me in my office.

Roll on 1 month. The results were initially very poor. My targeted area was most of Essex in the UK. No enquiries at all. All I seemed to get was people trying to sell me something. I voiced my concerns to Yell after 2 months. They set up a special scheme for me to improve the performance of my Yell entry. Which I hoped would transform my performance.

There was no improvement

I then fully audited my 6 months advertising spend performance in September 2018. The Yell.com results were still very poor. My targeted area was most of Essex in the UK. So I checked my Google Analytics. That confirmed that Yell had only provided 25 Yell unique visits to my website. Or about 2% of my total web traffic in 6 months. Google Organic’s figure was 381 in this period. Of these 25 visits via Yell.com, UK based users only accounted for 50% of my Yell.com referred web traffic. Essex IP address visits were 4 in total, but due to variable IP addresses and IP address masking, I’ve been generous and tripled that figure to 12 UK-Essex, targeted user website visits in 6 months.

I’ll repeat that. Only 12 people in Essex UK, the area I was specifically targeting bothered to visit my website in 6 months from Yell, where I was listed in the Top Position in Marketing and Advertising Consultants for 75% of the counties population. This caused a loss. Local Newpaper advertising is far more effictive. Return on Investment would have been positive rather than negative.

What eventually happened

Due to the poor performance on this contract, with zero customer service offered to rectify the situation, I decided to cancel the contract due to a serious breach of my trust and lack of support. Yell of course are not happy and have now referred my account for debt collection. So beware of dealing with Yell.com. They just want your money, once they’ve got your money or a signed contract, they hide behind an awful call centre service where there is a total lack of coordinated activity.

If this had of worked for me then I would not be moaning here!

Sorry, you did not keep paying us for our sub-standard service, you’ve also had the audacity to complain, so we’ve now referred your account to our debt collection agency Moorcroft