Its coming up to the time of year when many directories both large and small come knocking to get you to renew your annual subscription. Some charge only a few hundred dollars a year and others charge thousands. For all of them you can do a quick check of your website stats to see how many visitors they sent to your site.

In Google Analytics set the date range to the previous year using the date tool on the upper right of the Dashboard as shown below.

Next click on Traffic Sources in the left menu and then Referring Sites as shown below.

This will give you a list of the websites that have been referring visitors to you and the number of visitors they have referred. I have had clients who have been told by a salesperson that their directory sent ‘over 1200 visitors’ in the past 12 months yet when we have checked in Google Analytics the number was less than 10% of this.

If possible you need to be tracking phone enquiries and any other contacts as well to add to the overall number of referrals. Then it comes down to working out the overall value of each visitor and a possible conversion rate. If you are an accommodation provider and the average revenue from a visitor is $100, and you estimate a 2% conversion rate, then if a directory sent you 400 visitors you may estimate that eight of them converted into bookings. The ROI was $800 which might be okay if you pay $200 a year for your listing, but terrible if you pay $3000 a year to be on the directory.

It does not take long to check simple stats like this, and if you don’t have Google Analytics or a similar webstats package your developer can install it for you. A quick check can save you thousands of dollars and also help you focus your spend on directories that get you results. It is foolish to blindly pay for a directory because ‘everybody else is on it’.