Mohamed Salah: Local Search, Yellow Pages and Web Technologies

Last week we hosted a press conference at our premises in Maadi to announce to the media the launch of the strategic partnership between Egypt Yellow Pages and Otlob.com the online food delivery website in Egypt owned by LINKdotNET. More than 40 reporters, journalists, PR,  IT Specialists attended the conference that introduced the new food delivery service on Yellow.com.eg

Click here to try out the new food delivery service in more than 380 restaurants

Here is the video report of the event:

Here are some event photos:

From left to right Mohamed Salah, Marc Lambert, Ahmed Eraqi and Walid El Saadany

Yellow Pages & Otlob.com Press Conference

Reporters at the event

Many reporters, journalists and IT Specialists attended the press conference

One questions i get a lot about yellow.com.eg maps is what maps are you using? People see the Google map on our website so they think we are using Google maps data. This is not correct. 

What we are using is google maps API for the GUI. However, the data is compiled by us, what we do is geocoding our database. i.e. specifying the exact latitude and longitude for each listing we have. This sounds like a tough job, actually it is but we are performing very well in doing it. 

I guess it’s logical to ask why we are doing all this effort. The answer can be found if you visit Google Maps and try to find a restaurant in Egypt and if you visit Egypt Yellow Pages website 

On Google maps searching for La Bodega will produce 7 or 8 results, some of them might be correct and some are not. This is because the data source is the user generated content, which is not correct in many cases. 

La Bodega on Google Maps

on Yellow.com.eg when you search for La Bodega, you get one and only one map location, the map location is accurate and is geocoded by our local search team. If we are not sure about a map location, then we do not enter it, if you see a map location online this means the location is accurate. 

La Bodega on Yellow.com.eg

click here to see La Bodega restaurant profile page 

The nice thing about having our geocoded database is not only the accuracy, but also the flexibility of using any maps for the GUI, we have tried both Google maps and Microsoft virtual earth (now known as Bing maps), Google maps has proven so far superior in Egypt.

Another year has come and gone, i’m taking a moment here to look back at what happened in 2009, what people want in Egypt, what they are looking for and interested in.

Saying goodbye to 2009 and welcome to 2010, this is what people are interested in

Top 10 searches in www.yellow.com.eg during 2009

Hotels remain in number 1 like 2008, Restaurants jump from 4th position to second position, Schools comes in the third place while Banks drop 2 places to be in the 4th place.

Cars move out from the top 10 and Pharmacies enter in the 10th position.

Most popular businesses in www.yellow.com.eg during 2009

As for the businesses, HP retains its first place for the second year, DHL and Western Union comes in second and third places. Followed by Telco companies Vodafone and Raya, as for banks CIB jumps this year above HSBC, and finally cafes and fast food restaurants appear for the first time in the top 10 list: Cilantro, KFC followed by Pizza Hut in the 10th place.

Prefered visitor language for www.yellow.com.eg in 2009

One more interesting fact is that Arabic version of www.yellow.com.eg is getting more attention, usage has increased from 40% in 2008 to 45.8% in 2009 almost reaching the English. This is a direct result of enhancing the arabic search logic which now produces better and much more relevant results.

2009 was just a great year for Egypt Yellow Pages. 2010 will hopefully be even better, we will keep doing our best to serve our visitors and enhance their experience.

Merry Xmas and Happy new year to everyone

For a long long time Yellow Pages has been known as a data provider for contact information. Just providing phone numbers and address for businesses… and a little bit of more informaiton sometimes.

We are trying to change this conception. We are adding more and more features that allow users to complete their transactions from the website… Like booking a hotel or booking an event ticket, a service that we have launched just minutes ago!

Check out the new event booking service from Egypt Yellow Pages

So i took the 60$ credit i have as Google AdWords credit and decided to start a mini-campaign to see how the Pay Per Click advertising model works. Here is the story:

I created a campaign for the Egyptian stock market section that we launched at Yellow Pages, i thought it could use some more traffic. I followed the guidelines and chosen my words and the minimum bidding CPC that google recommends for each word to appear in a good place in the search results page and in the Google partner network websites that are relevant to that topic. After this i specified the daily budget that i want which was 2$ per day that i reduce later to 1$ when i was about to run out of credit later

Here are some words i have chosen that were approved by google as good traffic words: Egyptian stock market, Egyptian stock market news, Egyptian Bursa, EGX30 prices, Talaat Mostafa Stocks, Mobinil Stocks, ….

CPC was pretty cheap, $0.05 for Egyptain Stock Market, some words were cheaper other words were more expensive…. I’m just gonna focus here on this word…

So everything was set and i got around 80 hits on the first day of campaign July 16th 2009.. The larger portion was coming from Google network website not from Google search results page but it doesn’t matter… very nice, i though i just put this to bed… but i was wrong.. look at the below:

On 17 July, hits dropped to 25, so i opened the control panel to see what was wrong, if found that google suggest me to change the CPC bid amount to $0.07 for Egyptain Stock Market instead of $0.05. I did that and here we go again, hits reached 80’s again.

On 21 July and 27 July, I had to re-adjust the CPC again and again until it reached $0.21 which seemed after this that it was not enough… I just started to give up, i can’t keep monitoring this way on aday to day basis… I have other more important stuff to do than adjusting some keywords CPC… I took a look after a while and i found that the CPC recommeneded by google Passed the $1.10 margin!!

I was paying 5 cents for a keyword and getting good traffic. Now i am paying 21 cents and hardly getting any traffic.. Then i was expected to pay one dollar for each click!! All the credit i have (60$) and was planning to use for one month would now evaporate in one day.

I don’t really understand the pattern, what happened during these 2 weeks that raised the bid amount for Egyptain Stock Market from 5 cents to 1 dollar?? is it really people paying more in that word suddenly, does it make any sense that no one was interested in this word at all and all in a sudden everyone wants it?? or was this some way Google AdWords drag their customers to invest more and more by offering words for a little price at the begining and then gradually increasing the value until it reaches the market amount? i don’t really know but i know 2 things for sure:

1.  I don’t like PPC model, too much complicated.
2. Normal end users and SME would find it extremely difficult to manage this on their own unless provided to them by an advertising agency that manages their account. Putting in mind also the special needs of customers in the middle east and that they would rather have someone do these things for them instead of doing it themselves because it is too “technical”. Self provisioning and PPC model might not be the best advertising solution for MEA region.

The Yellow Pages time-based contractual model is simple, efficient and easy. If you compare it to PPC model it is also much more cost-effective.

In Yellow Pages we are always trying to improve the services we are offering to advertisers by monitoring and analyzing the statistics, logs, impressions, and hits their different ads get. This is why our products are always changing from one canvass to another in the favour of the end user and the advertisers as well.

The advertising services that we offer are based on the contract time, which is one year. It does not depend on the number of impression or hits the investors get. This issue whether we should move to the model of Pay Per Click (PPC), Cost Per Click (CPC), and Pay Per Call (PPCall) are always under consideration.

So which model is better? which model suits the customers in our middle east region? what model would suit SME’s better which makes the greater proportion of the Yellow Pages advertisers in middle east and worldwide?

I will try to answer these questions..

A couple of days ago i made a post about how Egypt Yellow Pages iPhone application traffic is 60% more than the rest of the Mobile Yellow Pages traffic combined…

Today i will explain this more, we should be actually looking at the smartphone traffic share rather than the sales share. According to October statistics published by AdMob, iPhone smart traffic share represents about 50% of all the smartphone devices including Symbian, RIM, Windows Mobile, Android, Palm, …

So how did we reach this situation? It was just a step by step… Traffic share for iPhone:

• Feb 09: 33% share
• Aug 09: 40% share
• Oct 09: 50% share

Traffic share for Symbian:

• Feb 09: 43%
• Aug 09: 34%
• Oct 09: 25%

Android looks also promising, from 2% in February to 11% in October

I’m sitting now looking at the statistics for Egypt Yellow Pages mobile portal and iPhone application. I still can’t believe that the iPhone hits surpassed the mobile portal hits almost by 60%.

In the past 90 days, mobile portal pages views reached 100k whereas iPhone hits exceeded 160k. These reports are generated by admob, the mobile ad platform that has been especially popular on the iPhone, which was acquired by google this month for $750 million in stock.

If you look at the global smart phone market share you will know why i am surprised, apple is no more than 14% of the global market share with probably even less percentage in Egypt, as opposed to Symbian OS market share (Nokia and Others), which is more than half the market share.

Mobile Handsets Market Share

I believe that the reason behind this mystery is that almost all iPhone users connect to the internet, download and use new applications each day. The iPhone is pretty much useless device if you are disconnected. Moreover, since its launch, Egypt Yellow Pages iPhone application has been a great success, one of the top free apps in Apple AppStore.

Download Egypt Yellow Pages iPhone application

Learn more about Mobile Yellow Pages