Is a Yahoo! Directory submission worth it?

• Jun. 1, 2004

I've been reading a lot in the forums lately about whether or not a paid directory submission to Yahoo! is worth the US$299 submission renewal fee. After all, it's not like it used to be where if you were listed in Google and had a Yahoo! directory listing, your directory description would replace the snippet from the Google results. Now with the new Yahoo! the organic results aren't amended with the directory text.

We have brought you articles in the past about the options for inclusion into Yahoo! and the different types of Yahoo! submissions, but we've never really explained the value of a Yahoo! paid directory submission.

So, is it still worth US$299?

Well, in order to find that out, you must determine what effect the directory listing had on your bottom line. In other words, you would need to find out if you made enough money from those Yahoo! directory referrals to justify the cost of the renewal.

But how do you do that? I'm sure you are wondering. Well, it can be done but it will take a little work.

Keep in mind that the strategy I'm going to go through here will work for virtually any online marketing campaign as long as you have a way of tracking visitors and referrals. You can perform this same analysis on any other paid campaign, such as other paid directories, you can track PPC campaigns, and even organic campaigns.

How do you do it?

First of all you, if you use a log analysis program you will need to define a filter which shows you the traffic generated by Yahoo Directory. Conversely if you use some form of real time tracking function such as WebTrends Live, or another form of visitor tracking, you will need to tell it some way to filter data based on a referrer.

In either case, you need to define a filter where the referrer is the Yahoo! directory (http://search.yahoo.com/search/dir). This is where the directory results are served from. To remove the "/dir" from the above string will return only organic search results. This is the key: defining the referrer.

If you are able to do this, then you simply need to re-run log reports (or generate new reports, depending on your tracking system) to see if you've received visitors from directory search results.

Further, if you are doing any type of conversion tracking, you can even see if there's been any type of conversion triggers from a directory search referral. If you don't have conversion triggers, then simply assume a similar conversion rate on the directory referrals.

How to calculate the value of the listing

In order to understand how to calculate the value of the Yahoo! directory listing, I'm going to go through an example using a fictitious site.

Let us say this site has an average conversion rate of 5%. That means that 5% of the visitors to the site convert, whether it is a purchase, an email request, or a form submittal. In this example, let us assume it's a form submittal.

So 5% of the sites visitors submit a form and I consider this a successful visit, or conversion.

Currently, my site gets 10,000 visitors a month. At a 5% conversion rate that means that 500 people fill out a form on my site. To keep it simple I'm going to say that all of those people who fill out the form eventually buy something worth $10 on average. If my average sale because of those forms filled out is $10, then I make about $5,000 per month from my site.

Now let us look at the directory referrals. If I assume the same 5% conversion rate, but the directory only refers 100 people per month, then the site is getting 5 conversions every month. If we assume the same average sale of $10 per conversion, then this site makes $50/month from Yahoo! directory referrals. Multiply that over 12 months and the Yahoo! directory makes me $600/year in sales on average.

As you can see, this is double what the annual submission fee is.

Therefore, as long as my profit exceeds $301/year (that is all the other costs associated with closing the sale including shipping, wages, and so on), then I can still pay for the renewal fee and make money. This is because $301/year profit plus $299/year renewal fee equals $600, which is what the Yahoo! directory made me in sales.

While this might be complicated to some people, it is a necessary calculation. As with any business venture, you need to keep your eye on costs and profits. And in this case, just because the renewal fee is $299/year, it is worth it to my business to pay the fee, as it generates more than that amount in business for me.

Rob Sullivan
Production Manager
Searchengineposition.com
Enquiro.com