Hi,

Yesterday I got a call from a sales rep from a hosting directory, which offered to host ads for us on their website.
Their offer starts at 75$ at month and goes to $1500/month.
they claim they get 40,000 hits per month.

Does anyone know if this kind of advertising generates enough leads to even pay for the advertising cost ? It seems to be that word of mouth works pretty well, and cost much less.

Anyone want to share their experiences?

A rule of thumb, dont let the host set the price, see what they are offering, make them prove they get 40k hits(make sure by hits they mean pageviews) See how many ads are on their site already. One thing I learned is that you have some say in the price. Dont just go with what they ask. IMHO the only reason prices are high is because all the directories have the same price.

"make sure by hits they mean page views"

Actually 40,000 page views is not that many visitors either. Make sure they are 40,000 visitors - perferably unique!

Monitor your stats all the way through to signups, not just clicks (many dirs are now using the "accidental click" method) and don't enter any long term deals.

Good luck.

$75 per month looks very resonable, but where will be your be your link? If they are giving just a link and your logo on their home page, it is worth bargain.

Actually 40,000 page views is not that many visitors either. Make sure they are 40,000 visitors - perferably unique!

That would be aswome but for $75 a month ... I cant see it happening!:)

To be honest I think there is a lot of baloney about quoted number of visitors to hosting directories.

Ask where they get their traffic from - a high % of it is bound to be worthless traffic.

We are No.6 & 7 on Google for Web Hosting + top10 on many other searches, No.8 on Yahoo....and we don't get anywhere near 60,000 unique visitors per month. We will eventually - but we are not going to augment our traffic with Junk just to get the numbers up.

Small directories with no real brand name & no position in search engines cannot feasibly have 60,000 unique highly targeted visitors each month. It's the quality of traffic that counts.

Thank you all for your posts. I will be contacting them to get more information regarding statistics, and the quality of the hits.

lately, leads from hosting directories are very low... it also depends what hosting directory you choose.......

ive been looking into advertising on a hosting directory.

the only thing i am wondering about is what kind of conversion ratios ill get..

even if your ratios arn't good - you get to keep that client until they cancel the account.

i heard the average is 6 months or so.

Any chance you could give us their URL so hosts will be able to provide you with some prior experience...

the only thing i am wondering about is what kind of conversion ratios ill get..

You can't predict conversion ratios because no website can bring or deliver sales to you. They can only deliver prospects that you convert to sales. So the biggest factor in the conversion ratio is yourself.

Approx the best I've seen of traffic converted to sales is 10% - but the majority is lower & many could not convert a million targeted prospects into a sale.

In terms of advertising - consider webmaster type sites, small business etc in addition to hosting directories. There are a ton of hosting directories and for the most part it's extremely doubtful that they get any quality targeted traffic themselves. Targeted traffic come from people with a need - for the most part traffic from PPC, Search engines. So in terms of ad spend for highly targeted traffic - TopHosts, WebHostDir, HostIndex, HostSearch are probably safe bets (they all have a solid brandname as a resource as well as good SE placement), although they are expensive. The rest - well it's anybodies guess where their traffic comes from - probably advertising themselves - in which case why pay a premium for ads you can buy yourself on related webmaster / business resources - i.e cut out the middle man.

Alexa.com is also a good tool to check relative traffic - it doesn't tell you how targeted the traffic is, and it has a level of innacuracy - but it's good for comparisons site-site.

Also consider some spending on less targetted traffic with high volume of impressions. Quality + less quality high volume will give better results in the end.

my simple suggestion is spend some bucks on some ad tracking software - nothing worse than paying for advertising and not seeing if its working.

We use our affiliate software to track sales from hosting directories, so we set up each directory as a dummy affiliate and thats the link visitors come in on, sets a cookie with a 90 day expiry and so we know where each sale came from not just each visitor.

my simple suggestion is spend some bucks on some ad tracking software - nothing worse than paying for advertising and not seeing if its working.

Excellent advice - if you are spending on Advertising - you need to be able to track it's effectiveness - not only to judge the source but for evaluation of your own opportunities to improve.

..and my comment on this is that if a campaign fails, I'd look at all possible reasons. The site you are advertising on might not be working for you. The placement of the ad on the page might not be working for you. The ad itself, the wording, the graphic, the message, the font even, might not be working for you.

It isn't spending lots of money, it is spending any amount of money wisely.

Checking the google pagerank can be a sign of a good directory also.

Its important that the directory gets a good listing within the major search engines, do a search for some related keywords to your hosting company and if the directory comes near the top its a sign that they are going to send you some great leads.

Hosting directories can usually beat hosting companies in search engine placement simple because of the amount of keywords in each listing. This is not the case with all SE but expecially in google. Search engine traffic is the best since it sends NEW webmasters your way.