I've signed up ROARZ computing for a Yellow Pages Online ad this week, and I was surprised to experience the stark difference between doing business with Yellow Pages Online (YPO) and Google Adwords (Adwords).  I've used Adwords a number of times before, so I'm quite familiar with how it works.

When you want to start an online advertising campaign with Adwords, you go to their website and create a login account.  From there, you can immediately setup your campaigns, enter your payment details, and see the campaign come to life within a couple of hours.  If you need to change anything, you just login again and change it.  The changes flow through almost immediately.

When you want an ad in Yellow Pages Online, you must speak with a person at Sensis.  You can't signup or pay online.  When you choose a Gold service, as we did (because we wanted a premium listing with a graphical ad), you must submit your ad to them via email, and then it takes up to two weeks for your ad to become active.  If you want to change anything about your listing, you have to email them or call them, and they make the changes for you.

Both YPO and Adwords are important parts of an integrated marketing campaign.  They reach different people in different ways. 

It was very interesting to see how they go about doing business though.  I wonder which one really is the better model; investing in the software development time to build a fully online system for submission and editing of ads (Google), or investing in call centre support time to take requests and apply the changes manually.  I can see the benefit of YPO's personalised service, especially when doing online ads for small businesses who might not be comfortable with using the online ad system, but I also appreciate the ability to make changes to my ad on demand and have them reflected immediately.  Adwords achieves the personal touch through partners (just like us here at ROARZ), who take care of publishing the Ads for the customer.  I wonder how hard it would be for YPO to speed up its time to market for updates.

Just thought I'd share my thoughts on this one.

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