Jan 30 2007
Sensis Looking for More Curry
It appears Sensis has committed to spending $100 million with US based Amdocs, to upgrade its technology over the next 5 years.
Michael Sainsbury writes :“Sensis’s core revenues from its Yellow Pages business are coming under attack from US-based internet firms such as Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, as well as media groups such as The Australian’s publisher, News Limited.
These companies are developing better local search capabilities and tapping local small businesses, which have previously relied on local papers and the Yellow Pages for advertising revenues. To keep up, Sensis needs to cut its cost base and improve its internet offerings.”
I couldn’t agree more. Look at this Alexa graph showing how Sensis search and Yellow Pages respectively are failing to halt a decline in popularity.
But a similar Alexa graph for the last month indicates that Truelocal’s traffic has appeared to die all of a sudden. I wonder what could cause such a dramatic drop?
What was also interesting about the article is that “Last August, Sensis sacked 14 local staff and sent the jobs to India via its contract with Amdocs, but there were no further plans for offshoring of jobs at this stage, a Sensis spokeswoman said. The latest project came about after two stabs at a major strategy review by Sensis“.
It’s a shame we have to send jobs and so much money overseas. What about our home baked talent? Or is it too expensive?
Chief Information Officer Gerry Sutton sums up that with the changes “We will be able to translate that into lower cost of operations or do more for the same amount of dollars.”
Does that mean lower advertising costs, or higher profits, I wonder?
4 Responses to “Sensis Looking for More Curry”
[…] Meg has this interesting post on the decline of Sensis and Yellow Pages. Check out their Alexa graphs. […]
Thanks for pointing this traffic out. One of the big shifts is that people now type a search straight into google AND then if not happy will go to white/yellow pages. There is also a bombardment of new online business listing sites / ideas.
I will give you an example of how Sensis are ‘milking’ their existing client base. You can upgrade your listing in numerous ways. One of them is to be top ranked on their online search. You can actually request traffic stats from sensis for the previous year in the category you are thinking of listing. In this example, the existing advertiser was paying several hundred dollars for what amounted to less than 10 click throughs. The customer decided to stick with his adwords compaign.
So few sites accurately track their traffic source that sensis probably gets away with it but it shows how they transfer similar logic from their traditional business to their online business.
Hi Angus,
I agree with you about Google and coupled with the fact that YP and WP do not allow the indexing of their individual business listings in the search engines (other than Sensis) doesn’t help to direct traffic either to their sites, or the business listed there. Thus there is increased interest in alternative directory sites which do get their listings indexed and, as you mention, the business’ ability to attract quality traffic through a well designed AdWords campaign.
Of course, there is the possibility that keywords will become increasingly expensive to bid on, thereby pricing the “little guys” out of the market and giving rise to either niche industry directory sites (like http://www.obits.com.au for example), or larger directories who can afford to bid higher on keywords on behalf of all the businesses and have extremely effective SEO and SEM.
Quotify.com.au is another really good example of a startup beginning to claw small business marketing dollars away from Sensis.