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This August it plans to pilot a consumer magazine-style car insurance guide, which it will door-drop to about 1.5m households nationwide.

The magazine will contain paid-for ads, information and consumer advice. If the trial succeeds, Yell hopes to increase the circulation to 6m a year. Industry experts speculate that Yell will then launch further guides for other sectors covered by its directories, including motoring and banking.

It will face stiff competition from brands including asrecommended, which distributes a total of 53m copies of its consumer titles annually through direct mail, door-drops and inserts.

It publishes numerous titles in the growing collaborative-marketing sector, including insurance, motoring, finance, offers and a guide targeting the over-50s.

The Yell guides' editorial content will be similar to that of asrecommended's titles, which feature experts including chef Antony Worrall Thompson and TV presenter and car expert Quentin Willson, who appears in its motoring guide next month.

In April, Yell Group's shares fell after it announced US sales, which account for about half its revenues, were set to grow by about 3% this year; analysts had expected growth of up to 9%. Yell says it distributed more than 137m copies of its directory in the UK and US last year.

Yell is battling stiff competition from search engines and paid-for search, such as Google, although it has its own search site, Yell.com.