Supermedia, formerly Idearc Media is a publicy traded company that has a contract to print and publish the Verizon Yellow Pages.  This contract runs for approximately 25 more years.

They tout this (to their employees) as though it is something great, but in my opinion, Yellow Pages is on its way out.  I believe that is why they have made the decision to start selling other products.  It is admirable that they have the foresight to diverse their offerings in an attempt to keep the company profitable, however they are late to the game.

Supermedia also sells search engine marketing (pay per click) programs and direct mail post cards.  They are the owners of Superpages.com.

Supermedias pay per click programs are wrought with flaws.  Some of which are:

  1. Bid Management Software  - it is designed to spend your budget whereever it can.  They sell it as state of the art, saying it adjusts your bids by the hour if need be to “maximize your R.O.I.”, but the reality is that it usually spends your budget on superpages.com (where they make 100% profit off your cost per click) vs. spending it on Google.
  2. Long Term Contracts – You should not have to sign a 12 month contract for ANY internet marketing program.  It is a matter of clicking a couple of buttons to pause or stop your campaign.  It is not complicated.
  3. Broad Matching all keywords – I believe this is in an effort to spend your budget every month.
  4. Large workloads – The employees at Supermedia that are tasked with running your program are overworked and underpaid.  Last I heard, they were each responsible for 80 accounts.  There is no way they can do a good job managing your adwords campaign if they have to do it for 80 clients.
  5. Loyalty issues – If the company is running your pay per click program and your competitors pay per click program, who’s interest do they have in mind?
  6. History of lying – a simple google search for Supermedia scam (or Idearc Media Scam since they changed their name) will reveal many, many complaints about this company.
  7. No analytics tied to pay per click programs – They show you clicks, cost per click, and conversions.  Big deal.  What about bounce rate, time on site, navigation path, exit pages, top content,  etc. etc. etc.  Pay Per Click without analytics is just guessing and a waste of a lot of your money.

As for their Direct Mail postcards – they are WAY overpriced.  I strongly advise you to shop around, you will find a much better deal.

For more information on the Supermedia scam – please see my blog post titled SuperMedia SEM scam.

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