Frequently Asked Questions
on the RP Photonics Buyer's Guide

Yes, they often do. However, it would be wrong to conclude that an enhanced listing in the best buyer's guide is not needed.

Because of our excellent search engine ranking (better than that of any other photonics buyer's guide), Google searches bring many people to our photonics encyclopedia or directly to our buyer's guide pages (e.g. to listings of suppliers) rather than to the website of a particular supplier. Therefore, it is essential to be found in our buyer's guide.

By the way, general Internet search engines are not a good replacement for a high-quality buyer's guide. They deliver a lot of search results which are not relevant (= presenting suppliers) and miss others. For quickly getting a reliable overview on available suppliers, you need to use a high-quality buyer's guide like ours.

Also note that people will see the information from our advertisers when reading encyclopedia articles; that's important for branding.

That would be enough if most users were using their buyer's guides. But apparently they aren't! Suppliers receive much more referral traffic from RP Photonics (rp-photonics.com) than from any other domain. That is consistent with the answer to the following question:

Engineers and scientists working in the field of laser technology, for example, frequently use one of the most useful resources on such topics on the internet – our website with the famous RP Photonics Encyclopedia and the RP Photonics Buyer's Guide. (Who else is offering such valuable resources for free??)

You can verify two things yourself:

• that our search engine ranking is far better than that of any other photonics website
• that you get more traffic from us to your website (check your server statistics!)

As a user, you generally can trust that the common buyer's guides don't suppress or prevent important suppliers from being listed. However, they may present companies for particular products when in fact they cannot deliver that. While not a risk, such poor data quality is a nuisance. The risk of overlooking important suppliers is much greater if you rely on internet searches.

As an advertiser, you should be very careful. For example, many published traffic statistics for websites are highly misleading, and some are even completely wrong – often inflating the data. Our recommendations include:

• Treating all published traffic data with great care. Ask what exactly they apply to, for example the buyer's guide pages or the whole website, which also contain thousands of articles which are irrelevant for your purposes. Check plausibility of the data by investigating the search engine ranking (at least with a quick search for some important keywords).
• Check yourself what is most relevant for you: the incoming traffic to your web server. You should at least study statistics on how many visits you obtain from different web domains. If possible, compare that with what they claim and draw your own conclusions.

We emphasize that our adverting offers are thoroughly honest and trustworthy.

We warmly recommend that you check your referral traffic. This is a good indication for how much marketing value is delivered by different websites. It depends on how many professionals actually use the sites and their features.

Of course, not everything of importance can be quantified. However, the nicest website can't deliver quality marketing if it cannot generate substantial referrals traffic.

First of all, suppliers with the ad package do get far more referral traffic as you can see from the following statistical data:

How do we achieve that? The usual yellow-pages effects such as using bold letters and displaying a company logo aren't sufficient. Our ad package gives you far more than just some “hello-look-here” effect. The main point is easily understood:

Imagine a product where we have 50 suppliers, five of which display their product description based on the ad package. If a reader finds something suitable there, he or she is unlikely to check the websites of the other 45 suppliers to find out what those offer – it is just too inconvenient to search the relevant pages on all those, while for our ad package customers they can get to the relevant page with one click. Generally, users need to decide quickly what to have a closer look at, using mostly the presented product descriptions.

Besides, with the ad package your information will even appear in related encyclopedia articles – that greatly supports your brand!

In addition, you profit from features like the strongly enhanced company profile, social media links, display of upcoming exhibitions, a prominent display in the alphabetical list of suppliers, one included banner and a special promotion etc.

For more details, see the page on buyer's guide entries.

The cost structure of our ad packages is very simple: a base price plus a price for each product. For more details, see the page on buyer's guide entries.

Our prices are very competitive. When comparing with other offers, think about the following:

• Nobody else in the photonics area can offer such a wealth of high quality information for buyers, and therefore our resource is outstandingly popular. Nevertheless, we offer lower prices than some competitors.
• When comparing with pay-per-click offers like Google Ads, be aware that the quality of traffic from those sources is far lower (e.g. according to measured engagement on your site), so that the effective cost per sales lead is usually higher (despite tentatively lower cost per click) – while the branding effect is also largely missing and service is minimal.

We are firmly convinced that nobody else gives you a better deal for online marketing in photonics. If you think you know a better place, please tell us!

Because of our diligent service, it is realistic that within a single hour you can

• learn how our system works,
• enter the required information, and
• get your entries activated,

even if you have 50 products, for example. We offer to collect your product descriptions and images from your website!

First you should check whether your company is already listed in our buyer's guide – see the list of suppliers. If your company is not listed yet, please use the simple registration form.

If your company is listed already, please click on the entry of your company in the list of suppliers in order to get to your profile. At the top right corner of the profile page, you will find the button “Edit Profile”, which brings you to a form to modify entry details. That form already contains the details already registered, so you can just add what is missing.

Our form for submitting your company data (see above) is easy to use. It contains a list of the many products that are able to be registered. It takes just one click to indicate that your company offers a certain product. If you have an ad package, you can then enter a product description, or just the URL of a page on your website on which we can find your product description and image.

No, they won't. If you submit your data with the form, they will first be reviewed by RP Photonics. If any ad package is ordered, you will obtain an e-mail with the details from us. Only when you confirm your consent with those, the enhanced entries will be displayed.

Furthermore, we won't automatically prolong your entries; we always ask for your consent.

Sure! You are welcome to update your address data, product information etc. at any time. We will do the corresponding changes on the website without additional cost.

You can even upgrade your enhancements at any time. We will make an offer if you tell us what you need.

We do our best to be very flexible and serve you with an excellent service.