Miriam Ellis hit the nail on the head. I myself have searched for local businesses and services on the internet but never get the results I am searching for. On many occasions, I have also requested quotes/services via online and never received a call back or response. How sad!! I pick up my local directory and make a quick call and all is well.
But the sad part is…the business owner or representative makes a visit or you visit them and they never once ask how you found their business information. Business owners listen to the hype and believe the print is not working but it really is. So they dump all advertising dollars on the internet and don’t get the ROI they expect, putting themselves in a bind because an effective internet campaign is not cheap and you must have a dedicated person to manage it. That’s why large companies have IT departments.
Are small businesses failing because of the economy? I don’t think so. They are confused on where and how to invest their advertising dollars.

As I mentioned before, we are working hard on focusing on our customer’s needs to – in many instances – earn back their trust.

The facts are print is still viable (independent data proves it) and companies like SuperMedia are best set up to take the content of our customers and get it into the hands of consumers – - whether it is print, online, socially, or via mobile.

I encourage you and your followers to Like/follow SuperMedia on Facebook and Twitter. We will respond/address to any feedback you may have and we will provide you with pertinent marketing information to help grow your business.

Best,
Andy

“Yes, its almost getting to the point where I have stopped my cheering of their decline… its like cheering on a dying man…..”

that is the the best stab I have heard taken at yellowpages in a looong time.

I have a client who spends about 25,000 per year on yellowpages and is saying that if the client renews the contract and adds on ppc then they will personally spot them 6,500 throughout the year in ad spend. They are having to give free internet ads to keep big clients paying for something that doesn’t worry as well. Very sad.

It’s hard to say if those scraped RCFs are having an impact on local search optimization – conventional wisdom says yes, but how much, unsure. Interesting, we have through a separate initiative noticed recently that where our locations use RCFs on their business web sites, Google is in almost every case still successfully picking those web sites up as citations for the correct business in Places’ “More About This Place” (despite the inconsistent phone #). So, maybe that inconsistent RCF phone number is not such a big deal anymore for citations, or at least not with Google Places?

We are also working with our RCF provider who has partnered with UBL and Localeze to “flag” known RCFs in their data distribution, with our permission. Unfortunately they aren’t willing to “replace” known RCFs in their data with the actual underlying numbers – they don’t even want to know what the actual underlying number is, but will happily take an indicator just so they know it’s a tracking number. As I understand it this is because unlike us, most advertisers still want to use RCFs online, and would therefore have zero interest in having them replaced with the actual number online. The saga continues!

@Chris
They do still have a url on the front page (it is attached to their name). The QR physically replaced what was a very obvious url.

@Jeff
Yes, I have seen several cases of call tracking numbers being scraped by Google and creating multiple listings and split citations for a given location. Worse I have seen a case where the original business lost control of the call tracking number and in the end a competitor ended up with that number.

@Matt
If you need to track your tracking, how does the value of call tracking value of it offset the negatives? Have you found that it confuses Google Places?

Here are my thoughts:

1) The decline in consumer print YP usage is not yet as steep as the decline in advertiser participation, meaning there are relatively more calls for fewer businesses. Of course, this only lasts for so long as after a while it would seem that a consumer opening the YP to see only 2 plumbers, they give up on the medium.

2) I manage the YP program for a national advertiser and while we are seeing our calls increase (we put an RCF on every line in every book), we are also seeing (via call challenges on our RCF lines, ie “press 1 if you found this number in a print directory, press 3 if you found it online) that a good portion of the tracked phone calls that are attributed to print YP are actually coming from ONLINE. This, despite the fact that our RCFs are only placed in print directories. No one seems to be talking about this.

Hypothesis is that the increases we have seen in YP call volume are due to more IYPs scraping print YP directories for data, resulting in RCFs showing up online and somewhat defeating the purpose of the call tracking. I say that because we don’t place much value in those online-generated calls as we know through our local search efforts that our local businesses can get those calls via inexpensive local search distribution (UBL, Localeze) ~$60/year.

+++++on another note+++++
@Mike, This is my 100th comment in your blog! i remember the 1st one as it was yesterday :):)

Thanks for all!