Should Your Chimney or Hearth Business be in the Yellow Pages?

I’m interviewing the industries best chimney sweep and hearth companies to find out what makes them top at what they do.  Here is some information I found out the past few weeks.  You may find it alarming.
A successful chimney sweep company was spending 90% of their advertising in the yellow pages.  When they started tracking the success via dedicated phone numbers, they found out that for every dollar they spend in the yellow pages they bring in 86 cents in revenue!  
Another successful company was a heavy yellow page advertiser as well.  The yellow page book started tracking the phone calls in their book, free of charge.  After six months of data, the company now saw that are spending $768 in yellow page ads to get the phone to ring once.  Fortunately they average about $600 per appointment and close over 90% of their calls.  So they are not losing as much money as most would.
Here is one last insight. Has your yellow page guy talked you into their program on the web?  Have they sent you reports showing you how many phone calls you are getting?  This data looks great, but here is what they will not tell you.  Often these companies create a one page website for you.  If your website is AAAChimney.com they buy the domain AAAChimney1.com  and set up a one page website with a few bullet points.  However they are really setting up a website that is competing with your online efforts.  They often use a pay-per-click campaign to promote your business.  You may already have a campaign in place.  If you do, you essentially are giving them permission to compete with your efforts and drive up the per click price.  The good news is you only pay them when they are successful in beating you.   If you have done some search engine optimization and come up near the top “organically”, you may be paying them for leads you already would have had.  Instead of going to your full website, customers now get a cheesy one page ad that looks like it's out of the yellow pages.  Your customer chose the internet over the yellow pages for a reason.
When I was child my parents used the Chicago Yellow Page Book to prop me up in the passenger seat so the seatbelt worked better.  When I told my kids this story the first thing they asked was “what is a Yellow Page Book?”.  When I explained it to them the thought it was really funny.  (The fact we found a phone number in a huge yellow book that is.)