Should i consider sponsor listings?

[mmr82]

Will a yahoo sponsor listing increase my ranking? Do any one here recommend it?
Here is my category:

Business and Economy > Business to Business > Business Opportunities > Directories

So please advice.

Thanks
Mohamed

[JamesR]

It will increase your exposure for those who are navigating to that particular directory. I would take a look at your logs and see if you are getting a lot of referrers from dir.yahoo.com . That would indicate a lot of hits from users navigating to your directory listing. A sponsored listing would then get you higher positioning and more hits.

My take is that people are going to ignore sites labeled sponsored on the search engines and directories more and more.

[2_much]

Hi mmr82,

Yahoo just increased the price of the sponsorship.

For us, it's not worth it anymore. It was good at first because the categories were not overly expensive, but now the ROI is definetely not there.

[ckern]

I agree completely, I think the best bet is just to optimize and get incoming links to your site, to improve ranking in search results for your keywords. Myself and everyone I know just pass up "Sponoserd" listings.

Although, if you are trying to think about seeing how featured/sponsored listings work, I think google's new adwords program or whatever might be a good try. Considering you only pay for the clicks that people go to your page, rather than a flat fee from yahoo. I am not sure how this works, and what others have to say about it.

I just think that paying for a sponsored listing in yahoo is not worth it. You are going to ideally spend more money than you will make. Depending on what you offer of course.

Just try to improve your search ranking for your keywords. Get some good incoming links.

[Orion]

When the sponsored listings first came out, we got a price and the number of impressions available. Then it was about $20CPM. Then later on, they cut the price in half, but we still didn't bite. Now the price is up to about $30CPM.

Because the impressions are so minimal, it has almost become an "ego buy". You see your name in lights, but it certainly doesn't begin to pay for itself.

Check and see if the sites participating in your category rotate in and out each month. If so, it probably isn't working for them.

[skibum]

We use it in one CRM category and YAHOO! referrals seem to have gone up by about 200 per month. In the CRM arena 0.50-$1.00/click is fairly good so we've stuck with it.