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Online Directory Listings

If you pay to advertise your business within online directories, you’re probably familiar with the annual call you get from your account manager.  It will usually run as follows:

  1. Friendly introduction, warming you up.
  2. Reference to the number of people who have viewed your page(s) within the online directory, and sometimes reference to how many of those people clicked through to your website.
  3. Your price to continue paying for your directory listing for the next year. Sometimes with an incentive.

The question in your mind during that call may be:

What business did we gain from that online directory in the past year?

The A1WebStats system will show you how many visitors you got from the online directories, and what those visitors looked at on your website – page by page.

That data will typically let you see:

  1. How many visitors you had from the online directory (during the time period you’re analysing – typically a year).
  2. Which of those visitors went further than the landing page, implying interest in other pages within your website.

But unless those visitors made contact via your website enquiry form, you won’t know for sure which of those made contact with you.

The only way to definitively see whether you gained business from your online directory visibility is to link enquiries gained back to their sources.

This means that when you have a process that records every enquiry gained, and then endeavours to link it back to your website visitors data at the date/time of enquiry, then you will see those where the enquirer had done one of the following:

  1. They had landed on your website via an online directory and then made contact on the same day.
  2. They made contact but didn’t appear to have arrived from an online directory, but when you looked at the previous visits from that enquirer, it showed that they had previously entered your website via the online directory (and so the online directory could be viewed as a positive aspect of the route towards the enquiry being gained).

To ensure that you’re efficiently linking all enquiries (including those where online directories may have helped) back to their sources, please do see our section Linking enquiries back to their sources.