Canpages – a 411-style online search engine and phonebook company – is now offering advertisers all-important multi-platform access to the US market, including print, online and virtual directories, as well as mobile applications. Yesterday the Burnaby, BC-based Canpages announced a partnership with Utah-based publisher Phone Directories Company (PDC).
‘It’s a good merger of interests,’ Canpages’ CEO Olivier Vincent tells MiC. ‘We know them well. We’ve been working with them for more than a year, and they have a very dynamic sales organization. We share a lot of the same DNA, as they have dedication, entrepreneurship and innovation.’
The new partnership will rebrand PDC as Ziplocal – turning PDCpages.com into Ziplocal.com – and will expand Canpages’ current reach by 120,000 customers, 167 local markets and eight million homes and businesses. This, says Vincent, nearly the doubles the size of Canpages’ reach.
‘We’re expecting our traffic to go up on both sides of the border as a result of this partnership,’ Vincent says.
Since establishing Canpages in 2006, Vincent’s says his company has enjoyed steady growth by adding services such as Street Scene, which provides 360-degree views of Canadian cities at street level, voice-recognition local search apps for mobile, and GigPark, a social network and recommendations platform.
Vincent reports that Canpages receives nearly 3.5 million unique visitors per month, up nearly tenfold from the company’s early days. The new partnership should drive those numbers further, he adds.
‘Having a foothold in the US is clearly giving us a lot more visibility as an organization, and I think that will benefit us in terms of revenue, funding and innovation in general,’ Vincent says. ‘The fact that we can leverage onto much bigger territories first and foremost will give us access to bigger markets and to be able to continue to fund our innovation pipe.’
Canpages ad products – which appear both online and on its mobile site – for business listings include video, virtual visits, photo albums, mobile network ads, diamond display ads, premium reach ads (which appear on a search result regardless of location) and ‘premium click to call,’ which allows customers a free call directly to the business when they click on the online ad.
