Just received a hard sell from seek.net regarding a listing in both their online and paper driven (London based) directory.
Seems plausible enough - £280 with discount for an entry with 200 words. You can throw your freephone numbers in there etc.
Not coming from the South East I have no idea how successful this product is and what the returns are likely to be.
Anyone have any experience of their service and likely ROI?
Regds
C
Try looking up their Alexa ranking and comparing them against known sources of referrals.
f
Basically their gambit is that people surfing would take the time to check out an offline directory, then go back to you PC and type in the domain...
Ask them to send you a copy - it's not the most user-friendly manual I have used for sure.
Plus, what are Yahoo, Google, Inktomi, Altavista etc for?
I would certainly think very hard about doing it - I have never seen a 'live' copy on the streets, and this is very similar to the DotFlick directory (which disappeared after one print run - because there was no use and no tracking facilities for you to see returns)
;)
[edited by: IanTurner at 8:40 pm (utc) on Jan. 21, 2004]
[edit reason] language Timothy [/edit]
Also can you give us an estimate of the number of entries at present.
The usual scenario, unprovable claims of fantastic referals from their directory which is only distributed in the South East. I have family who live and work in London - they've never seen it.
I think I'll pass until I get it delivered through my own letterbox.
They have appalling database management skills to - I have 13 seek.net directories here ;)
Oh, and welcome to the board.
How are you going to track it? They keep saying that it comes from a unique url - but I would try and capture stuff your end to using www.yourwidget.com/seek as the landing page.
Let us know how you get on!
The telesales tactics they use smell of desperation and no matter how many times i say no....they keep calling.
That's what we had - with three of us working in the same office we had a total of 12 copies... we started to know the writing and stopped bothering to open in the end.
Having said all of that if they could beef up their stats reporting and provide conclusive proof as well as access to references from previous advertisers that you can check on, then all forms of advertising are worth looking at... IMHO I can't see this being one of them though!
You should employ someone to deflect these nuisance calls or make out you're someone else when they call, I know what a pain in the arse they can be.
I'll update you when book comes out but if we carry on like this I'm not really bothered how good it is.
No offence - but do you work for Seek?
I have four colleagues who put cash upfront and not one o fthem ever even got a call.... combined I think they mustered about 4 clickthroughs in total!
Maybe you have found the right market for it - if so please sticky me!
TW
I've also got some stats, but it's their word against mine, so who knows?!
Personally - it's a nice looking book, but like someone posted earlier - we have search engines for that. I mean, you're at your PC with your fingers on the keyboard - why would you want to go away, search through a book and then come back....not to mention that you get fresher content from a search engine anyway.
I dont know why but i actually took my time to explain why i was not interested. Usually i would not give telesales the the steam off my x?@!.
However i explained that i know my ROI from overture, epotting et all...but with seek it is an unknown.
His response to this was to tell me that Overture are so impressed with Seek.net and the quality of the traffic that they themselves are going to be advertising in the directory.
They also tried to give me a very weak close to get the sale on the fact that the print deadline was next week and would need an answer today.
I have no problems with the concept of seek..and it may work in certain markets..but to repeat my first comment. "The telesales team smell of desperation"
I for one have spent enough time with them and the next time they call they will be handled in the same way as all other telesales callers.....
