Did you know that 30% of YellowPages.ca traffic comes from mobile? Source: YPG.com. This news actually was announced during YPGs 1st quarter results and today, Greg Sterling did a post on his blog regarding this as well, see “YPG: 30% of Our Searches Come from Mobile“. This number is pretty impressive when you consider that only 2-years ago that number represented well less than 1%.
Another piece of news today is that the new YellowPages.ca application is a featured application in the iTunes store – this is pretty big news as you can’t buy your way to this placement, your application has to be deemed pretty good for the Apple editorial team to pick up.
For this blog post I thought it would be great to take a look back.
Having been with YPG since 2006, as an employee (actually been working with the company since 2001), I managed the team that launched YPG into the world of iPhone applications. Back in 2009 there was not a lot of focus on mobile, but since then the mobile team has expanded and is now under the leadership of Matthieu Houle, a colleague and friend of mine who as we say at YPG, is “rocking da house”. Under his leadership there have been 2 more releases of the YellowPages.ca iPhone application with the most recent only 1 month old.
Here is the evolution of the home page of the iPhone Application for YellowPages.ca
2009 (features included basic search for business, people and reverse, display ads, photos and videos)
2010 (features included hot links to popular categories, streamlined and more intuitive interface, all YP.ca content including videos and photos)
2011 (features include ratings and reviews, type ahead for categories and locations and customizable popular buttons)
Download the latest application here in the iTunes store.
On November 8, 2009, I did a blog post, “Canada’s Yellow Pages(TM) Mobile App, over 1/2 Million Downloads and 3 Reasons for its Success” which in terms of the number of downloads is no longer accurate (we are over a couple of million) but the 3 reasons why I believe Canadians love this application hold.
If you don’t want to read the full article, let me summarize the 3 reasons why back then Canadians loved this app and why it holds true today –
1) Simplicity,
2) Content (even more so today) and
3) Usability (which gets better with every release).