Yellow Pages Call Tracking

[Larry]

My client has an advertising account with Yellow Pages (Canada). Yellow pages places citations on the web in places such as canpages.ca (I believe Yellow Pages owns Canpages.ca). The phone number used in the citation is not my clients number. He says Yellow Pages using a different number to track calls.

How does this effect the sites ranking in the local results? Does the different phone number hurt confuse Google and hurt the rankings. This goes against what I have learned about keeping the NAP consistent on citations.

Any advice would be appreciated.

 

[whitespark]

Larry,

This makes me so angry. Yes, it is hurting their ability to rank. Yellowpages.ca is THE primary data aggregator in Canada and their practice of using call tracking numbers makes a huge mess for Canadian businesses. My recommendation is to cancel the advertising immediately (but take note of the call tracking number first), then hint down and cleanup any citations that have been spread around with the tracking number.

Would you be willing to share a link to the listing with the tracking number? I'd like to investigate this and assess the damage. I am thinking about doing a post about it.



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[Larry]

Thank you for your reply Darren.

Here is the link to the citation I found with the call tracking number.
Comfort Shoppe, The - Bowmanville, ON - 160 Baseline Rd E | Canpages.

If you need it here is the link to the clients Google + Page https://plus.google.com/+Comfortshoppe/

I would appreciate it if you would let me know what you find in your research. I advised my client to cancel the Yellow Pages advertising as you suggested, but I am having a hard time convincing them that a better ranking in Google's local search results is important than the traffic he gets from the Yellow Pages ads.

Thanks you again for your reply.

 

[whitespark]

I took a quick look, and I think this is less of a problem than I expected it to be. There aren't very many citations out there with the number, and they're only in the yellowpages network:
https://www.google.ca/search?q="289-274-4768"+"comfort+shoppe"

So, it's not causing wide-spread NAP inconsistency.

Also, it hasn't created a listing in Google yet. Searching Maps for the tracking number shows nothing, and searching for the business name and address variations isn't showing me any dupes.

I don't think this is causing too much damage to their rankings. The yellowpages and canpages are extremely important citations in Canada though, so I still recommend dropping the call tracking number. If the client is really getting value from the advertising, then I'd suggest asking yellowpages if he can keep his ads but use his proper number instead of the call tracking number. My guess is that they'd rather do that then lose his advertising business.

Hope this helps.

 

[Chris McCreery]

Hey Larry I was wondering if your client also has one of the lovely YP landing pages? Usually it's a subdomain of calls.net.


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[Larry]

Not that I know of. In fact I did not not that YP sold landing pages until I Google it and found that they are selling Search Engine Optimized Landing Pages for $800 per month. OMG!!

 

[Larry]

Thanks for taking the time to look into this Darren. I also appreciate your suggestions. Thank you very much.

 

[Chris McCreery]

One of my clients had that service with tracking number, a cloaking domain of their actual website, landing page and separate 800 number even though the ads were just for the city, oh and YP had their business name and address listed incorrect .


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[Margaret Ornsby]

This makes me so angry. Yes, it is hurting their ability to rank. Yellowpages.ca is THE primary data aggregator in Canada

I empathise Darren. Same issue here in Australia. Yellowpages constantly promoting call tracking numbers only helps them and hurts their customers. Don't really understand how they can be such a highly "credible" data source for Google and then do this? Their reps even brag about their "special relationship with Google" as a selling point (at least the one I met with did!). The equivalent of malpractice, IMHO.

How on earth can a normal business person who isn't technically minded, possibly know the trap they're about to fall into...

Rant over. Just wanted to say "hear hear Darren!". Next time I'll do just that

 

[Margaret Ornsby]

Ooh, just noticed (maybe it's been this way for a while and I never noticed). Sensis/YellowPages are no longer credited in the map results for Google here in AU. Is the mighty Sensis that fallen? (sold in part recently for 600m+, was valued at over 12b nine years ago)