Tattoo gallery: The Death of the Yellow Pages?

Tattoos.com takes a closer look at how Tattoo Studios are spending their money on yellow pages and if it's time to rethink traditional print advertising VS. online marketing.

For tattoo artists and studio owners the last decade has been a roller coaster ride. We entered 2000 with tattoo art as king. It reigned supreme. The first decade of the new millenia saw "Reality" shows about tattoos launch almost every year worldwide and Ed Hardy became a household name as a fashion icon even though most people had no clue who he really was. Tattooing was hot, hotter than ever, and professional established studios basked in the glory. However, the global recession that hit near the end of decade had an all to obvious effect on luxury items.

As tattooists hunkered down for the economic downturn they started to look more closely at where they were spending there advertising dollars. Traditionally the biggest bucks went to the local yellow pages. Stu Kay, artist, studio owner, and co-founder of tattoos.com wonders are the yellow pages days numbered? "When I registered the tattoos.com domain and the domains for my studios in Toronto back in 1995, the seed was planted that online was going to be a way clients find you in the future. But today it's undeniable, there's a new era in communication not only between artists and clients but between artists and the entire support network for the tattoo community that seems to use the web and social media to communicate". This has made Stu rethink his budgets for the studios. In the coming year he will be taking more of that yellow pages advertising and reinvest it in online advertising instead.

We recently set up google analytics for one of Stu Kay's studios, Lower East Side Tattoo in Toronto's east end. Google Analytics is a free program that is relatively easy to set up for anybody with basic computer skills. It tracks how many people visit your website, how they got to your website and what they look at on your site, plus a whole lot of other important information that is valuable for any studio owner., Tattoos.com has posted step by step instructions on how to set it up on our "Tips" page for tattoo studios. We also setup Lower East side on Google Maps before we set up the analytics program so we could easily show potential clients looking for a tattooist in their area how to get to the studio. The screenshots below from the google Analytics interface show how many clients are visiting Lower East Sides website on a daily basis. As you can see we installed the software in mid December and, withthe exception of a couple of of slower days, which was while everyone was off doing there last minute christmas shopping, the website for the studio typically gets between 45-90 visitors online per day.

Labels: Death, Pages?, Yellow