Internet yellow pages (IYP) attract customer more prepared to buy - and spend more money - than the local search services of Google and Yahoo, according to a new study by comScore, reports AdAge. The study is among the first to look at consumer behavior in online local search. Released at AD:TECH, the survey found that people do fewer searches on IYP - on average, five - before they buy, compared with eight searches on search engines.
Online, IYP consumers spent on average between 5 percent and 17 percent more than they did on the search engines in the category they searched in. And they spend offline, too - between 13 percent and 17 percent more in bricks-and-mortar stores after searching in IYP than searching on an engine.
The rivalry for the local customer has heated up in the last year as all the major search engines - Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL and AskJeeves - have started or upgraded local-search ability.
