Speaking Sensis

With the end of the year almost upon us, Sensis’ CEO, Bruce Akhurst, provides his first bi-monthly update.

Hi.

I thought it might be good to end the year by starting something… a regular report that I hope will give you a deeper insight into how Sensis is working to improve the value we offer all Australians.

New ways to help you find, buy and sell
Sensis is committed to helping you find, buy and sell. Our services help you find the suppliers you need right when you need them. In doing this, we help thousands of local businesses find their lifeblood – customers.

Our innovation programs reflect this commitment. How can we make our services simpler and more informative for buyers? And how can we build the value and simplicity of our advertiser services?

On this front, we’ve been particularly busy in the last few weeks. We launched the White Pages® app for iPhone recently. I was very happy to see that it reached the #1 free app in Apple’s App Store very quickly. This caps off an exciting quarter for our mobile sites, with usage growing off the scale. We launched White Pages® Mobile four months ago and it’s already delivering over 400,000 visits a month¹. At about the same time, we also launched the Yellow Pages® iPhone app. Since then, Yellow Pages® Mobile usage has more than doubled to over 650,000 visits a month²… in just a few months!  Clearly, Australians are connecting with these new generation mobile services and that’s great for advertisers. Our network strategy means that Yellow Pages® advertisers – print and online – can be searched through mobile and therefore can benefit from mobile usage growth.

We’ve also recently commenced delivery of the 2009 Yellow Pages®. This year’s book includes a more informative front cover and an expanded information section. Both of these enhancements were specific requests from Australians who participated in research we conducted earlier this year.

In Yellow Pages® Online, we’ve recently launched a new advertiser product – Purely Mobile Business, or PMB. PMB is designed for mobile businesses, like mobile mechanics, looking to reach out to customers in the areas they service.

We also recently launched Category Search, which is a new product that lets advertisers combine Voice, Whereis® and Citysearch® advertising into a single, easy to use product. Response has been strong, with hundreds of customers choosing Category Search in just a few weeks.

The Whereis® team has just released 3D City Maps for GPS to sat nav equipment manufacturers. 3D City Maps bring the Sydney and Melbourne CBD areas to life by providing a real-time 3D city-scape. 3D City Maps should be launched in popular GPS units shortly, and more cities will be ‘3D’d’ in the near future.

Finally, MediaSmart – our online and mobile display advertising business – has released new targeting capabilities. Working closely with Telstra, we’ve developed a segmentation capability that ensures mobile display advertising is more relevant and targeted for both mobile users and advertisers… like helping a major bank deliver specific branch manager contact details to customers mobile phones based on their location. This is a genuinely unique capability and I’m pleased to say the support from marketers has been fantastic.

In the field
Right now, our Yellow Pages® regional and local consultants are out talking to advertisers, as are our White Pages® consultants. We’ve been backing them up with new products, comprehensive training and a much stronger focus on engaging with local communities.

This local focus led to the opening of a new office in Penrith on November 10 (with offices in Ballina and Coffs Harbour also opening soon). We were really pleased to open Penrith by announcing a new community partnership with Great Community Transport. At the same time, we’ve been increasing our support for local businesses by regularly sponsoring and speaking at local events – over 80 in the last few months.

1.5 million calls… and counting
If you ever wanted proof of the value of Yellow Pages®, here it is. As you may know, we’ve been running a metered ad program for two years now. This program helps advertisers track the number of calls they receive from Yellow Pages® print.

In January, we began monitoring the phone calls delivered by Yellow Pages® print to a small cross-section of display ad customers (a sample of less than 1% of our total customer base). By early November, the number of calls delivered to these customers by Yellow Pages® print passed the 1.5 million threshold!

Imagine how many valuable phone calls Yellow Pages® is delivering to all our advertisers. Imagine how many more enquiries there are when you add people who are bypassing the phone and visiting the store or office. And imagine how that number could grow even further if you included all the other Sensis and third party online, mobile and voice services that form the Yellow Pages® network.

Interesting movements in the advertising market
Recently, we’ve seen some interesting movements in the media sector. The September quarter IAB report showed 3.3% growth in the online advertising market compared to the September quarter last year³. While this is a marked slowdown on last year, the results were really buoying for Sensis, as they show we are growing our share of the market.

Another interesting observation comes from our Adstream business. Adstream sits at the centre of the ad industry by helping marketers, agencies and media outlets, like TV, radio and newspaper publishers, manage and distribute their ad content. We’ve seen renewed growth in enquiries to Adstream recently. Could this mean the ad industry’s on its way back?

Our people have spoken
The other day, we received the results of our latest employee opinion survey. This is a global survey undertaken by Towers Perrin and it covers some of Australia’s, and the worlds, largest companies. In the latest survey, Sensis exceeded the Australian norm (the average of all Australian companies) in every category. Our results also benchmarked well among the world’s best employers, with results in a number of categories exceeding global norms. This is fantastic news. We work hard to ensure Sensis is a great place to work for our present and future employees. These results tell us we’re on the right track.

Sensis Sustainability Report
Finally, if you’d like to know more about Sensis’ strategy, operations, performance and impacts, I’d recommend you check out the 2008/9 Sensis Sustainability Report, which has just been launched. You can download it today from our newly upgraded corporate site.

Until next time
So that’s it for now. Have a happy, relaxing and safe Christmas and New Year. I’ll be back to you with a further update in February. In the meantime, thanks for all your support. You can rest assured we’ll be pulling out all stops to keep improving our value to you.

1: Omiture Site Catalyst, November 2009;
2: ibid
3: PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Internet Advertising Bureau Online Advertising Expenditure Report, quarter ended September 2009.

Charles Wright recently wrote in The Age how the benefits of search engine optimisation (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) for one small business provided a far better return on investment (ROI) than advertising in the Yellow Pages®.

It’s easy to find one example of a business that’s been successful with any sort of advertising. The challenge is to find lots of them. Yellow Pages® has hundreds of examples of advertisers who get a majority of their business through Yellow Pages®. We even put some in our TV ad earlier this year.

Charles’ article was based on a simple assessment of ROI: cost of SEM outlay and the return in website traffic compared to the cost of advertising with Yellow Pages® Online and the subsequent website.

Where his case fell down is that it left out a number of costs a small business faces when gearing up for effective SEM and SEO activity.

These include the costs of building, hosting and maintaining a decent website, and possibly the cost of an SEO/SEM consultancy (or a significant time cost if you are able to do it yourself).

Sure there are online businesses that can manage all this and find customers. But there are a lot of businesses that can’t. Which is where the Yellow Pages® network can deliver real value.

Through its network, Yellow Pages® provides an effective multi-channel solution. With one Yellow Pages® ad, a business goes in the Yellow Pages® Book, Yellow Pages® Mobile, and the 1234 and Call Connect phone services.

In addition, Yellow Pages® also gives businesses a significant online presence by putting them in yellowpages.com.au, whereis.com and by making Yellow Pages® listings available to be searched on Google Maps and Bing Maps.

In fact, if you add up all these print, online, voice and mobile services, you find that Yellow Pages® advertiser content can be searched for through services used by almost 65% of Australians every month.

And that doesn’t include search engines. Recognising their significant value, we’ve made Yellow Pages® content not only searchable through the major search sites but we’ve optimised the content for search engines as well. That’s why over 2.5 million referrals come from search engines to Yellow Pages® Online every month.

People searching Yellow Pages® are buyers, not browsers. And they are often serious buyers who are ready to make a major purchase such as buying tyres for their car, booking an appointment with a dentist, booking a function at a restaurant or hiring a tradesman for work on their house.

The Yellow Pages® network helps puts businesses in more places customers are looking – including major online sites – with ease and convenience, leaving them to get on with running their business.

Sometimes the numbers just talk for themselves. Take Yellow Pages® Mobile usage data…

As you all become devoted (hopefully) readers of the Crunch! column, you’ll begin to notice that my articles all take on roughly the same formula.

Obviously, there’ll be stats… a no-brainer considering this column is meant to be about stats.

But those stats will be surrounded by witty (hopefully) witticisms and insightful (hopefully) insights as well.

There’s a simple reason for that. To the vast majority of the world (i.e. the majority of people who aren’t bone fide pen-holder-carrying geeks), staring at a bunch of numbers is like watching grass grow.

But, every now and then, you come across a set of stats that just talk for themselves – no frilly additions necessary.

Here’s an example.

1.    In October, the Yellow Pages® Mobile audience hit half a million unique visitors for the first time¹.

2.    All up, it’s taken Yellow Pages® Mobile a touch over 18 months to reach half a million unique visitors¹. By comparison, it took Yellow Pages® Online more than five years to reach that mark².

Still think mobile marketing’s sitting on the runway?

Think again.

1.  Omniture. July to October 2009
2.  RedSheriff 2004/2005 data

Crunch! is a new column looking at the numbers behind advertising and local search. In today’s Crunch!… Defining what a click is. That’s easy. Defining what a click isn’t. That’s harder… but much more important.

In the 12 years I’ve been working in online media, there’s one thing that’s always befuddled me.

It’s the fact that online marketers cite measurement as the biggest barrier to advertising on what is touted as the world’s most measurable medium.

Go figure!

To highlight this, a 2007 McKinsey Quarterly report* found that over 50% of Internet advertisers saw “insufficient metrics to measure impact” as a barrier to using or considering digital advertising.

And there’ve been similar surveys, with similar results, in Australia.

So, what’s going on here? How the hell can measuring such a measurable medium raise so much angst?

I’ve long thought there’s two reasons.

The first is confusion about how we’re measuring – in other words the different public measurement services and their methodologies. For quite a while now, there’s been concern in Australia about the accuracy of online statistics. Naturally, when there’s a lack of faith in the source, there’s going to be a lack of faith in the data as well.

The second is a lack of clarity around what we’re measuring. Just think about the simple issue of online traffic as an example. Over the years, we’ve been stumped by a blinding array of different metrics – hits, page views, sessions, visits, unique users and unique visitors just to start with.

These metrics all mean slightly different things but, despite that, they’re often quoted interchangeably: a recipe for much pulling-of-hair and gnashing-of-teeth if I ever saw one.

This metric malaise is a really big problem, and I wanted to touch on it today with a focus on one particular metric – the humble click.

WHAT’S A CLICK?

The other day, an interesting question was raised at a customer panel session I attended.

On the surface, the question – “what (in advertising terms) is a click?” – would seem pretty straightforward.

Put simply, it’s when a person clicks from a feeder – like a search engine or banner ad – to a particular advertiser’s web site. It’s the action that gives rise to pricing terms like ‘cost per click’ and ‘pay per click’.

Okay, no biggie there.

CLICKS AIN’T LEADS

But the question becomes a lot murkier when you think about what a click isn’t. In particular, whether a click and a lead are the same thing.

Now, this might seem like nit-picking, but it’s a really important question – especially for the numerically-obsessed, like me. It gets to the heart of how you understand, measure and evaluate the contribution of different media to your business.

To start with, let’s think about this in a traditional media context.

Let’s say you send out a DM piece to 1,000 potential customers. As a result, 100 people take a moment to read it and 10 are so enamoured with what you’ve said that they give you a call.

What have you got there? 1,000 leads? 100 leads? 10 leads?

If you’re a media outlet trying to justify your existence, you might say 100. You might even say 1,000 if you’re feeling particularly hairy-chested (and/or deluded).

But if you’re a manager trying to get a handle on your sales pipeline, the answer is unequivocal… 10.

A lead isn’t a passing ship; it’s a real potential customer who has called, emailed, visited or contacted you in some way expressing a real interest.

A lead is a real sales opportunity that – most critically – you have a real chance to close.

Don’t get me wrong. The fact that 100 people read your DM piece (or clicked through to your web site) is great. They now know you and have you in the back of their minds. They’ve interacted with your brand.

But those people don’t qualify as ‘leads’ until they take that next step and get in touch with you.

BRINGING CONVERSION INTO THE MIX

Clearly, you can’t properly equate clicks to leads (which take the form of calls, visits, emails and other forms of enquiry) in the way some try to do these days.

To properly measure the leads generated by online advertising, you need to bring another ratio into play – conversion.

Conversion measures how many people actually took that next step of contacting you.

Most research suggests that online conversion rates are quite low – in the low single digits. That means the actual leads stemming from your online advertising may only be a relatively small fraction of the number of clicks.

THE BOTTOM LINE

So, what’s the bottom line here?

Firstly, comparing clicks with leads ain’t comparing apples with apples. If you want to compare clicks generated by one form of advertising with calls or visits generated by another, you need to think about the conversion as well. How many people actually visited your site and then contacted you?

Secondly, think about how well your web site converts browsers to buyers. Optimising online lead-generation campaigns means not just getting lots of people to your site, but having a site that efficiently converts them to leads as well.

And finally, if someone comes to you offering a mountain of ‘leads’, ask them precisely what they mean by the word ‘leads’.

How many of them will be real leads – enquiries from potential customers that you have a chance to close?

You might just find they’re leading you up the garden path.

* How companies are marketing online: A McKinsey Global Survey. September 2007

Sensis’ Michelle Sherwood talks to small and medium sized businesses about how to get the most bang for their advertising buck.

Sensis’ General Manager of Marketing, Michelle Sherwood presented to a room of more than 900 small and medium sized businesses at the Small Business BIG Marketing event on Thursday 27 August.

Held at Central Pier in the Docklands, the event was a part of Small Business Victoria’s month long small business festival Energise Enterprise 09, of which Yellow Pages® is a platinum sponsor.

Michelle’s presentation, ‘Making your advertising work for you’ gave the businesses in the room practical insights and advice about effectively marketing and advertising.

Michelle Sherwood on the dais

“With consumer confidence on the increase, it’s more important than ever for your business to be seen by customers when they’re looking to buy.

“Our job at Yellow Pages® is to bring buyers and sellers together, whether that be through print, online or mobile directories, search and mapping websites or telephone information services,” she said.

The Yellow Pages® and White Pages® face to face sales representatives were also out in force, with small business owners flocking to the stands to find out how Yellow Pages and White Pages can help to grow their business.

Luke and Deepak at the Yellow Pages® stand

Visit www.yellowadvertising.com.au or www.whywhitepages.com.au for more information.

This year Sensis is sponsoring a series of lunches for members of the Sydney Chamber of Commerce. After two of these lunches, it’s really pleasing to get feedback from this diverse audience that we’ve shared a few things about consumers, small businesses and advertising that they didn’t already know…and actually wanted to know!

I mean, let’s face it, how many times have you turned up to a seminar or lunch only to walk away thinking, I’ve just been robbed of two precious hours in my life and I should demand a refund! I’m not saying Sensis hasn’t been guilty of this in the past… we’ve had our moments like any large business given the opportunity to put someone on the soapbox. But we’re starting to use opportunities like this to – and don’t gag here – help people.  So we asked the Chamber what their members wanted to know to about digital marketing.

And as the chicken and beef mains made their way around the room, our head of Yellow Pages® Digital, Sandeep Baruah, explained that the future of digital marketing in business will see a range of new applications at the disposal of the marketer. The question is what opportunities do they really present to increase brand equity and a company’s bottom line?

For some business, just knowing where to start is daunting in itself.

Sandeep unlocked some of the mystery around digital marketing tools such as:

• Social networking sites
• Search engine marketing
• Search engine optimisation
• Content syndication
• Mobile internet and
• Mobile codes

And he gave the audience a realistic check-list to help them make decisions about their digital marketing strategies:

• Who are my customers and where are they looking?
• What media are they accessing that influences their buying decisions?
• Which of these channels can I use to engage my customers?
• How can I use new technology to integrate campaigns and content across different media?
• Finally, what return am I actually going to see from this investment and how will I measure it?

Answering these questions will help any business go a long way to ensuring that they’re not simply swallowing the hype around new ways of reaching consumers, or putting all of their eggs in one basket.

According to Gerry Sutton, Sensis’ Chief Operating Officer, the Yellow Pages® and White Pages® directories are winning for buyers, sellers, investors and the Australian community.

WA:    Gerry, thanks for your time. You must have been busy since taking over the Yellow Pages® and White Pages® in May.

GS:    You bet. We’re right in the middle of the Yellow Pages® metro sales campaign, and the White Pages® has just kicked off its new campaign. So I’ve been all over Australia… meeting our people and our customers.

WA:    What are your initial observations about the Yellow Pages® and White Pages®?

GS:    Well, as you know, I’ve been very close to these businesses for a long time now. So I can’t give you a true ‘outsiders’ view. But I would say there are three things that have always struck me about our directories.

First up, this is a significant business. Yellow Pages® and White Pages® earns about $1.75bn in revenue and meets the needs of millions of buyers and almost 600,000 advertisers. The bulk of those advertiser customers are Australian small and medium businesses.

Secondly, it’s a real people business. Most advertising connects brands and markets. We’re bringing real people – buyers and sellers – together. Two people at a time. We’re about generating phone calls and store visits from people who are ready to buy right now.

And the way we work with our customers. It’s all person to person. Managing this business is about working with thousands of people to meet the very specific needs of millions… every day.

Thirdly, it’s a very sophisticated business. Yellow Pages® advertisers now reach out to potential buyers not only through the print directories, but an extensive online, voice and mobile network that includes brands like Yellow Pages® Online, Yellow Pages® Mobile, 1234 and Whereis®. And, now, Yellow Pages® listings can also be searched for through third party sites like Bing Maps, Google Maps and Yahoo! OneSearch, which is Yahoo!’s mobile search application.

There are few other media businesses that have broken down the barriers in the way Yellow Pages® has.

WA:    Gerry, you’ve talked about a back to basics approach. What do you mean?

GS:    As I’ve said, this is a real people business. We’ll grow by constantly getting better at meeting our customers’ needs. For us that means more information more easily for buyers and more customers for our advertisers. Do that well and we’ll grow satisfaction, usage, advertiser uptake and, ultimately revenue. It’s that simple.

I’m a big fan of customer satisfaction metrics. They’re no-holds-barred feedback on whether you’re doing the right thing by the customer. And it’s been gratifying to see both buyer and seller satisfaction rise strongly in recent times.

We’ve achieved that by really focussing our attention on customer needs. From the info-rich ad program, which helps advertisers produce more effective advertising, to metered ads, which help them understand ad performance. We’ve launched new services like Yellow™ in the car in nine markets as well as White Pages® Mobile. We’ve added new content products to Yellow Pages® Online and White Pages® Online. These content products help buyers by giving them more information and advertisers by giving them a stronger presence.

And, you know what? These content products have taken off. Take the White Pages® Online Package product for advertisers. Advertiser uptake has gone way beyond our expectations. This one product is almost solely responsible for White Pages® Online revenue tripling in two years.

That’s what I mean by back to basics. Deliver what the customer wants. Do that well and everything else will pretty much look after itself.

WA:    What about usage – particularly print? It’s a pretty hotly debated topic in the industry.

GS:     The Yellow Pages® print directories are valued highly by many Australians. According to Roy Morgan, almost 7m Australians use them every month¹. About 4m of these print directory users are also daily Internet users². These are people who use the Internet all the time, and yet they still see value in using the print directory. After all, it can often be quicker to find and compare businesses in print. At the other end of the scale, about a third of Australian households don’t have Internet access, according to the ABS³. For them, print directories could be their only access to information on local people and businesses.

In saying all this, however, there’s two really important points I need to make.

Firstly, I think the advertising community needs to get beyond this print vs online discussion. We live in a multi-channel world now and the whole print vs online debate is pretty dated.

So we’re really focussed on the usage the combined network delivers our customers. As I’ve said, unique usage of Yellow Pages® print is almost 7m a month⁴. At the same time, usage of our digital network is about 4.8m a month⁵. And unique usage of the third party sites we have arrangements with is about 4.5m a month⁶.

And Yellow Pages® advertiser listings can be searched for through all these services.

Secondly, usage maybe the word on the industry’s lips, but it isn’t, on its own, the main game.

Our customers are interested in winning business – emails, phone calls, store visits and so on. So conversion becomes really important. How many of those users contacted me and how many of them buy? How many leads is my advertising generating for me?

We know from years of research that about 90% of buyers using the Yellow Pages® directory go on to contact a business and about 72% of them buy⁷.

There’s few, if any advertising businesses that can deliver the volume of users and high conversion – in short, the numbers of leads – that Yellow Pages® can.

But now we’re getting more granular with this. As I said, we’ve introduced the info rich advertising program to help our customers create more effective ads. This helps them convert more users into callers.

And we’ve introduced metered ads so our customers can get a really strong sense of not just usage but of the actual calls they’re receiving.

In the end, these numbers – unique usage across all the directories, sites and services, conversion, number of calls – all matter to our customers. Not how’s print doing against online.

WA:    So, Gerry, where do you see the future for directories?

GS:    That’s a good question. I couldn’t begin to answer it completely in a short interview. But here’s a few thoughts.

Directories advertising is traditionally about significant events in a person’s life… weddings, buying a house or car and so on, or unplanned events such as a breakdown of some sort.

And that’s still the major driver of usage. But I think that with the integration of directories content, maps and mobiles into local search, we’ve been able to create a more day to day whenever, wherever you are proposition. Something you use to find your way around every day.

That’s why I think local search and directories is such an exploding market. If you look at usage across all local search sites, it’s grown massively over the last few years.

And I think we can get much better at using our directories to make life easier every day. We can make the whole cross-channel experience much more seamless, with print, online, voice and mobile all talking to each other in different ways.

And we can add sat nav, point of sale scanning and so on.

It won’t matter where you are or what you’re doing, you’ll only ever be a few clicks away from whatever you need.

I guess the other thing I’d add is a comment about digital TV. As you know, I’ve been involved in the digital TV industry for many years. And I’m really interested in seeing how local search and digital TV come together.

But that’s a few years away yet.

WA:    Thanks a lot Gerry.

1: Roy Morgan, Single Source Australia. Average monthly unique users, Yellow Pages® print. April 2008 to March 2009. Base: Austalians 14+
2: ibid
3: Australian Bureau of Statistics, Household Use of Information Technology, Australia, 2007-08
4: Roy Morgan, Single Source Australia. Average monthly unique users, Yellow Pages® print. April 2008 to March 2009. Base: Austalians 14+
5: ibid.
6: ibid.
7: Percentage of serches conducted using the Yellow Pages® Directory that resulted in a business or supplier being contacted. Independent research of people aged 18-64, conducted by TNS in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaeide and Perth, January – March 2007 and July – December 2007.

Gerry Sutton, Sensis COO, and Robert Rath, CEO of Sensis China, talk about the achievement of a major milestone for Sensis.

WA:    Hi Gerry and Robert. This year’s financial results contain a real milestone for Sensis. On a reported basis, Internet advertising revenues, including online and mobile, grew by 47% to reach $502 million. So we’ve hit half a billion dollars in Internet advertising revenue – the first Australian owned and operated company to do so, I believe.

GS:    It’s a great achievement. Fourteen years ago we entered the online space with the first online directory in the world. Like everyone at the time, our people had high hopes, but no real idea where digital media would take us. To stand here now and see an audience of millions, well over 100,000 Australian online advertising customers and half a billion dollars in revenue is really satisfying.

RR:    I feel really privileged in a way. I’ve worked closely with the Yellow Pages® and White Pages® teams for a long time, so I’ve got to see that business grow. Now, I’ve had the chance to play a role in the birth of Sensis China. It’s fantastic.

WA:    How has Sensis achieved this result?

RR:    Gerry, I think we’ve achieved growth in China and Australia in two very different ways. One is pure start up while the other is extending a traditional media business. What do you think?

GS:    I agree. In Australia, we’ve integrated digital into the existing Yellow Pages® and White Pages® businesses. It’s been a way of adding value to an existing proposition for both buyers and sellers.

RR:    And, in China, it’s pure online start-up. I saw an interesting statistic the other day. In the USA, they have about 2,000 directories for every thousand people – a 2:1 ratio. In Australia, it’s more like 1:1. But in China, there are only about 20 directories for every thousand people. And, of course, we’re not in the directories market in China.

WA:    Can you point to any defining moments over the years?

GS:    A few years ago, we changed the business model for Yellow Pages® Online. In the beginning, it was a separate business to print with a different sales force. We then integrated the two businesses. If you advertised in print all your content went online. A simple tick the box solution. You could then sign up to enhanced content and position online if you chose to. The minute we did that, online customer numbers skyrocketed. And it was great for buyers too because it put more content into the online directory.

Once we’d integrated the print and online directories, we set about extending what we call the Yellow Pages® network even further. Firstly into our own services like Whereis® and 1234 and then into third party services like Google Maps and Bing Maps. This has added enormous reach for our advertisers and made cross-platform advertising simple for them.

The other thing that comes to mind is much more recent. In my other interview with you, I mentioned the White Pages® Online Platform and how that product led to a real growth spurt in customer uptake and revenue. Thanks to that one product White Pages® Online has tripled in two years and doubled in the last year.

Actually, White Pages® Online Platform flags another big milestone that hasn’t happened yet. This year we’ll complete our systems and process transformation. We actually turned part of it on for White Pages® last year. And the new systems meant we were able to produce the White Pages® Online Platform product in just a few days. Under our old legacy systems, it would have taken weeks.

WA:    So White Pages® Online Platform is a sign of things to come?

GS:    That’s right.

WA:    Robert, what have been the big moves for you?

RR:    Of course, our China investments are only about two years old, but there have been some big wins already. Clearly we’ve invested in the right businesses. We’ve integrated them well, which can be seen in the great way our people are working together: and the team has delivered on expansion plans, like the Soufun 100 cities program. As a result, these investments are delivering really exciting growth.

WA:    So, where to from here?

GS:    I’ve already mentioned our transformation. This will have a huge impact on the types of services we can deliver and the way we deliver them. On that score, I do want to acknowledge one thing. People forget that everything we’ve achieved in our online directories has been done on twenty to thirty year old legacy systems. To be honest, it’s been a real struggle at times and our people have done a fantastic job to deliver what they have. The future’s going to be very different.

RR:    In China’s case, we’ll keep doing what we’re doing. Looking for opportunities for geographic expansion and looking for new services we can deliver to our customers. We’ll also focus more and more on the mobile space, which is starting to emerge. It’s an exciting time.

WA:    Thanks Robert. Thanks Gerry.

There’s a lot of improvement going on at Sensis. And our customers like what they’re seeing.

If there’s one thing this world definitely doesn’t want for, it’s business advice.

I mean, there’s more business books out there today than skivvies at a Trekkies convention. If you don’t believe me, try searching for “marketing” at Amazon.com’s book section… and be amazed by the mind-snapping 535,000 results you get .

The irony is that this torrent of advice all boils down to some pretty basic principles. And the most fundamental of them all is:

Give your customers what they want.

With that in mind, Sensis has been working closely with the buyers and sellers who rely on our services: listening to them, learning about their needs and launching the solutions to help them.

This approach has led to a stream of new innovations over the last couple of years. From info-rich advertising and metered ads to the Yellow™ in the car directory, to agreements with Ninemsn and Google Maps, to re-builds of our directory web sites to the new mobile sites that are now delivering 8% of our total digital traffic (1) .

More importantly, this customer-centric approach – which can be seen not just in our product development, but in our focus on effective sales and customer service – has contributed to a real spike in customer satisfaction. Between February 08 and May 09, for example, satisfaction among users of our directory sites increased by 10 percentage points (pp) for Yellow Pages® OnLine (2) and 14pp for White Pages® OnLine (3).

And we’re keeping the heat on the innovation front so we can deliver continuous improvement to our customers. In just the last fortnight, for example, we’ve launched the following upgrades to our digital local search sites.

Easy to access

Buyers are looking for more touchpoints, so they can access our services whenever and wherever they want to.

To assist this, we’ve just launched White Pages® Mobile. The new mobile version of White Pages® gives you access to residential, business or government contacts together with maps and directions and the ability to save listings to your contacts or share them with friends. And it’s all just one click away from the BigPond mobile menu.

We’ve also improved the popular send to mobile feature on Whereis.com. Send to mobile is a simple way to send your online search results to your mobile. That way, you can easily take the business details you found on your computer out on the road with you.

Easy to search

People are also looking for easier ways to search – less entry boxes and more relevant results. Over the last fortnight, we’ve continued to answer this call by launching:

• Streamlined search in White Pages® OnLine. We’ve reduced the number of entry windows, which means less typing and faster results. For example, the number of business search windows has shrunk from four to two.
• Auto-complete for White Pages® OnLine searches. By suggesting answers while you’re typing this new facility saves even more time and helps ensure more relevant results.
• New user-friendly URLs for Yellow Pages® OnLine advertiser pages. This means site users can easily bookmark the results page for businesses they’re interested in. And, if you’re an advertiser, you can link straight from your web site to your Yellow Pages® OnLine ad.
• The addition of business listing names to the Yellow Pages® OnLine search algorithm. This has the potential to greatly expand the relevant results site users will receive. For example, a search for Thai Restaurants on the Gold Coast currently returns 87 listings, instead of only 26 in the past.

Easy to find

And what about when you’ve found the business listing you want? What are we doing to make it easier for you to get in contact with that business?

If you’re hungry, Yellow Pages® OnLine has made it easier than ever to book a restaurant or order a meal. There are already over 500 registered Menulog restaurants across Australia that are now also listed with Yellow Pages® OnLine under headings like Restaurants and Cafes.  For example, you can search for Indian Restaurants in Melbourne VIC, and find restaurants like Nirankar Fine Indian Cuisine or Bombay Beat Restaurant that provide one click access to Menulog’s booking and ordering facilities.

We’ve also added landmark navigation to the Whereis.com web site. As a result, you’ll begin seeing turn by turn directions like “turn right at the Post Office” rather than just “turn right in 200m”. This enhancement is the result of research undertaken by Melbourne Uni’s Geomatics department and Whereis. The research clearly showed that people are able to navigate more easily and precisely using landmarks.

I hope you’ll agree that that’s not a bad haul for a fortnight. But it’s far from the end. Continuous improvement means continuous innovation, so keep your eye on Speaking Sensis for more listening, learning and launching in the future.

Okay. So, hopefully my last article established that print isn’t a spent force in local search… it’s actually growing.

Having done that, however, I now need to change tack a bit and proffer a slightly different view: that this whole ‘print vs online’ debate is all a bit of a pointless exercise.

For the best part of a decade now, local search players of various persuasions have been running around with their chests puffed out, proclaiming to anyone who’ll listen that “my channel’s bigger than your channel”.

But the sad truth about this posturing is that it’s all pretty much irrelevant.

The bottom line is that buyers are exercising their right to choice and searching for local businesses across all sorts of different channels – like print, online, voice and mobile.

Here’s a case in point.

If we cut the print vs online usage of all the print and online services containing Yellow Pages® advertiser content, we find an interesting set of numbers(1) :

• 41% of the audience use print only;
• 32% use online only;
• 26% use both.

Clearly, in this environment, you can’t truly optimise a local search strategy by choosing between print or online (or any of the other channels).

You can only do that by choosing them all.

Or course, that’s not such an easy thing. If you start toting up the number of vendors offering local search services across all these channels, you’ll quickly find they number into the hundreds.

If you tried to deal with all of them, you could end up spending so much time finding customers that you’d have no time to serve them.

So, the ideal solution in local search ends up looking a bit like this:

1. Provide a wide range of services to buyers so they can choose the way they want to search. That can ultimately lead to a larger audience;
2. Syndicate advertiser content across as many of those channels as possible so advertisers can optimise reach and still get some sleep.

That, in essence, is what we’ve tried to do with Yellow Pages®.

When you advertise in Yellow Pages® today, you’re not just advertising in the print directories. Your advertising is syndicated across a broad network of different services that spans not only different channels but different brands as well.

This includes not only the Yellow Pages® print directories, but the yellow.com.au and whereis.com.au web sites, the 1234 and Call Connect voice services and the Yellow™ Mobile and Whereis® Mobile sites as well.

And it also includes sites from other vendors. Today, Yellow Pages® advertiser content can be searched for in Google Maps, MyLocal, LiveLocal and the new Bing Maps site.

The net result of this ‘one ad, many avenues’ strategy is that advertisers can reach out to a much larger base of potential buyers through the one campaign.

In short, the potential for more reach, more easily.

And the impact of this sort of multi-channel strategy is pretty significant. The bottom line is that syndication through a range of brands and channels leads to a total potential reach for advertisers that no single channel local search solution can come close to matching.

In online, for example, there are six local search sites that individually hold more than 2% share of online traffic in Hitwise’s business directories category(2). They are yellow.com.au, whereis.com.au, whitepages.com.au, Google Maps, TrueLocal and Hotfrog .

Because of Yellow’s syndication strategy (allowing Yellow Pages® content to be searched for through yellow.com.au, whereis.com.au Google Maps as well as Microsoft’s local search sites), Yellow Pages® advertising could appear on sites that generate 64.5% of this traffic. White Pages® Online accounts for 22.5% and the other sites 13%(3) .

In other words, the multi-brand online syndication leads to a massive share of the traffic generated by these major local search sites.

But then you have to figure in print, voice and mobile as well. These add something like 15 million searches to the potential reach of Yellow Pages® advertising every week(4) .

Clearly, being able to advertise across multiple brands and channels is a major advantage in local search.

Which, as I said before, kind of renders this whole ‘print vs online’ debate as moot.

The bottom line here is that people aren’t turning into online zealots, no matter how much some wish they were.

Instead, buyers are showing their preference for choice.

The local search providers and advertisers who recognise that are the ones most likely to win.

Related links

Sensis on local search 1 – BIG

Sensis on local search 2 – GROWING