Golden Pages Advertising Pitfalls

January 15, 2007 by Matt Eve
Filed under: General Rants 

While I was driving this morning I heard an advert from a finance company for some kind of investment. You know the type which have the guy speaking really fast at the end reeling off the financial services disclaimers, such as investments may fall as well as rise blah blah blah.

Next I heard an advert for the Golden Pages extolling the virtues to Irish businesses of advertising in their directory. This made me think that what would the disclaimer for the golden pages to business owners sound like? It would have to include the following:

  1. If you are not happy with your advert then tough luck you are stuck with it for a year.
  2. Performance of your advert will be impossible to measure unless you include some kind of tracking mechanism which we won’t suggest to you.
  3. Adverts created by our in house team will make your business blend into the background of all your competitors and in no way make your business stand out.
  4. You pay us upfront for no guarantee of results and you cannot cancel your advert – once it is done it is done.

Tread carefully when it comes to investing your marketing budget, don’t get sucked in to the glitz and ego massaging of a massive advert in the Golden pages. Always ask yourself could I be getting a better return elsewhere.

If you do decide to go ahead then please make sure you incorporate some kind of response tracking mechanism, ideally one that allows you to track not only your response rate but also how many actually convert to paying sales.

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Comments

One Comment on Golden Pages Advertising Pitfalls

  1. Joe Egan on Sun, 28th Mar 2010 9:15 am

    2. Ripoff..AVOID the goldenpages. Premium adverts but no calls in 6 months for an electrician. Worst company ever. AVOID.

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