Evaluating Web Directory Effectiveness

From ten to several hundred dollars, literally dozens of Internet directories stand ready to take your money in return for listings of various sizes and configurations in their bed & breakfast directories. How do you know which to list with?

While we can and will offer some specific suggestions, after a few basic directories, you will need to do some research, and choose some to try. But how can you evaluate whether a given directory actually produces heads in your beds? The question is made difficult by the fact that guests rarely know where they found you on the Internet. Most sites now include links to your home page, and if your home page does its job, the visitor calls you based upon the presentation on that page. They will recall their original search or where it lead them only infrequently. “I found you on the Internet.” Great, really helps.

For an independent evaluation of various directories, you might want to visit http://www.innstar.com , Missouri innkeeper Bill Wayne's meticulously researched impartial evaluation of major national and regional directories. This is the first place to go to see how a particular directory stacks up.

And fortunately, there are two free resources you can use to help in evaluating directory advertising effectiveness and your web site's performance in general. They are Extreme Tracker (http://www.extreme-dm.com) and WebTrendsLive (http://www.webtrendslive.com). Both of these services have basic levels which are absolutely free. You (or your webmaster) place their code on your page and every visitor will be counted, information about their computing environment tracked, the page or search engine they found you on identified, and records of this and other information kept until you reset the data.

From this information, I know that 67% of visitors to the Hummingbird Inn website find us via website referrers (directories) versus 33% who find us via search engines. And I know just how many find us via each of the directories we advertise on. (A side note here: many of the people who find us via directories found the directories via search engines. I no longer fight the battle to come up on the top 10 or 20 or for that many 100 on search engine results. The directories spend lots of money doing that for me.)

A very high proportion of our new inn guests find us via the Internet, and if we exclude those who find us on search engines, we can easily identify from our records the number of roomnights attributable to unidentified Internet sources. Let's say that you had 400 new inn guest roomnights from unidentified Internet sources last year. Let's further say that Extreme Tracker tells you that 65% of 15,000 total unique visitors to your website came from Internet referrers (directories). That means that 9750 unique visitors were referred by directories. 9750 divided by 400 equals 24.4. That is the number of unique visitors it takes to generate one roomnight in revenue.

Now you have something to work with. Let's say that Directory BBAmerica sent 50 visitors to your website last year. 50 divided by 24.4 equals 2.04. That is the number of roomnights which (statistically speaking) BBAmerica generated for you. If your average roomnight is worth $100, BBAmerica brought you $200 in revenue. Now if it cost you $20 to advertise in the BBAmerica directory, that is probably a pretty good deal. If it cost $100, it was not.

While the method just described may not help you decide whether to advertise in a given directory initially, it will certainly be one tool you can use in deciding whether or not to renew.

What are some of the directories that have proven to be good generators of traffic to Virginia B&B home pages? In general, they are the same ones that do well nationally: BBOnline, Bedandbreadkfast.com, Dallas Ad Mall are the first three I recommend. The next three are somewhat less effective, but generally worth the money: Triple1, Choice-Guide, InnSeekers. (Aside from 1^st Travelers Choice, I do not recommend paying to be on any site that does not link to your home page; on the other hand, if a site is free, why not take advantage of it?)

I have not mentioned BBAV.org above, because if you are reading this, you are already on this site. Since the new site went active last year, it has consistently been in the top 7 to 10 referrers to my website. Given all the other advantages of membership in BBAV, I consider this performance to be well worth the relatively small portion of dues attributable to the website.

(Jeremy Robinson, innkeeper at the Hummingbird Inn, Goshen, is a member of the BBAV Board of Directors, and is also a web page developer who owns and operates his own server.)