Directory price now £24.95

[Brian Turner]

The price for a listing in the Platinax Directory is now £24.95.

The reason for this is a couple-fold:

1. The previous pricing encouraged submission of some very low quality sites. As I'm keen to ensure the directory remains a quality business directory, I want to make sure SME's are more likely to submit to short-term profit webmasters.

2. Perception of value means the previous pricing could too easily make the directory seem cheap and tacky, which is a shame because more people use the directory search function than any other section of Platinax.

This tells me that a directory listing has real human-user value, and I need to help ensure that it's targeted to the right people.

The Platinax Directory I think is still a bargain - really, listings should be running on a subscription basis, so for the time-being that £24.95 one-time fee is still a great bargain.

[monaghan]

Is there any weighting to a new higher quality listing at the higher fee or are we all in the same pot ?

Do you have any stats for click throughs ?

[Brian Turner]

I'm literally about to edit the code so that newer listings are always at the top.

As for clickthroughs - I'm afraid there is no tracking enabled so I have no idea about specific site stats. I suspect that, like with offline directories, some categories are going to get more response than others. Again, without stats tracking I have no idea which areas may work best. I figured people would overall prefer search-engine friendly links than redirect through a script.

[peterjhale]

Webmasters are probably the people searching to see if a) their site is there b) what cat to put it in, rather than actually trying to find something

[Brian Turner]

It's certainly probably some webmasters are using it for that - but the amount of traffic the search function gets, I'd be quite surprised if that were the only reason.

[brooke2]

So whats the general stats?

How many unique searches a day?

[Brian Turner]

I'm afraid I don't have a figure on searches per day.

[brooke2]

if you dont mind me saying. i find it hard to believe you cant come up with a figure off the top of your head. maybe its a touchy subject?

im interested because i have one. i'll let you know how much traffic i get, and thats about 20 unique hits a day. thats sod all considering. but considering the volume of directories out there i'm guessing that thats about par for the course.

[Brian Turner]

It's more that I don't have any specific stats tracking on the directory (and won't make any up!), and simply have Webalizer and Awstats providing stats for Platinax.

And while these programs can provide details on overall traffic for the site, or else the number of "hits" a URL gets, I don't believe there's a way to get exact figures on "unique visitors" from them, which I believe you're asking.

I have to admit, I really should be tracking stats on the directory more closely - in fact, the whole Platinax site in general. All my sites.

As mentioned in a previous thread, though, I've not found a stats tracking solution I'm really happy with - but if you know of anything in PHP I don't have to use a third-party for, I certainly wouldn't be against providing full stats for the Platinax directory, that can be broken down into *meaningful* figures.

[Brian Turner]

Returning to the issue of user behaviour - until I'm able to track useful stats directly, the Last Search function of the directory may be of help in determining how the directory search function is being used - I've just changed that to provide Last 100 Searches:
http://www.platinax.co.uk/directory/search_last.php

On the one hand, it's obvious that there are people checking backlinks or listings of existing sites - but there's also a strong trend of people searching on a keyword basis.

My personal impression is that people really are using the directory to locate business services - but the search data is there which will allow people to draw their own conclusions at least on what sort of traffic is using the directory.