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The ISP Guide to Benefiting From CanadianISP

What is CanadianISP.ca ?
Who uses CanadianISP ?
What does it cost to use CanadianISP ?
What additional information gets listed for ISPs who pay to advertise, versus ISPs who use the free listing ?
What benefit, then, is the paid promotional services ?
What other benefits are there to listing my ISP with CanadianISP ?
What kind of paid promotional services can I get and what do they do ? What does the paid promotional services cost ?
What kind of traffic does CanadianISP get ? How many people will see my ISP ?
Why do you want an owner/senior managers' email ? Are you going to spam me ?
Will I ever be obligated to pay money to CanadianISP ? Will I be removed if I don't ?
What are the effects of advertising on CanadianISP ?

What is CanadianISP.ca ?

CanadianISP is a search and comparison service. It lists Internet Service Providers across Canada.

Who uses CanadianISP ?

The site is used by consumers across the country to find an ISP to fit their connectivity needs for both residential and business use. Residential services receive a mildly larger number of searches than business.

ISPs use CanadianISP to gain exposure to markets they traditionally do not, especially when they wish to avoid the expense of per-geographic market advertising, as CanadianISP is national.

What does it cost to use CanadianISP ?

The site is absolutely free for both the consumers who search the site, as well as the ISPs listed within.

What additional information gets listed for ISPs who pay to advertise, versus ISPs who use the free listing ?

Absolutely none: ISPs list the same data: cities, services, prices, caps, speeds and so on whether they use the free listing service or paid promotional services.

What benefit, then, is the paid promotional services ?

At present, there are 210 ISPs listed on the site. The most common search is "Find all ISPs offering all services in <search city>". For example, in the most populous market, Toronto, Ontario, such a search has 57 ISPs matching that search (50 results, even after narrowing the search to DSL ISPs only)

On a typical users' screen, about 20 ISPs are in the immediate visibility area, without scrolling. Just like with Google and other search engines, it is the first-to-appear that has the most impact. Given that ISPs are listed randomly for fairness (to avoid giving "ACME ISP" an unfair advantage over "Zmax ISP"), the chance of being seen in that first page of results is roughly 33%. One of the paid promotional services is the purchase of a 'guaranteed rank', in spots one through ten. ISPs at the top of the page always see more detail views and more clickthroughs - and therefore more converted, paying customers, than those listed randomly.

What other benefits are there to listing my ISP with CanadianISP ?

In addition to the increased exposure and additional, paying, customers, you have access to a lot of statistics gathered through CanadianISP:

  • Most popular cities
  • Most popular service types
  • Competitor stats (views, clickrthroughs, view:click rates, 4% estimated conversion rates)
  • Your own detailed stats
  • Ad stats (banner views and click throughs)
  • All stats available month-by-month and are live, up-to-the minute

If I can see my competitor stats, does that mean they can see mine ?

Indeed it does, but you will quickly see the benefit to this, as using this information quickly shows you what they - or you - are doing right and wrong with their marketing and customer communications efforts. Many an ISP has seen their new customer rate skyrocket simply due to seeing which ISP is "doing things right" and learning from this information.

What kind of paid promotional services can I get and what do they do ?

  1. Guaranteed Rank
    Always displays your ISP in the position you've purchased - You'll never be displayed "off screen", hoping people scroll down to see "what's left"
  2. Highlighting
    Uses a different background colour for your ISP name and services in the search results page - Drawing the eye a lot faster than the default text (This is included at no extra charge with Guaranteed Rank)
  3. Text Under ISP
    Allows you to put an additional line of text under your ISP name in the results page, showing more information for users and making your ISP entry on the page bigger, drawing the eye to your result before others
  4. Banners - Horizontal
    A banner across the top of the page, in the nav bar. Horizontal banners are traditionally used as a long-term brand recognition strategy. Best used for terms longer than six months.
  5. Banners - Skyscraper
    A large, vertical banner to the left and/or right of the search results. In addition to brand recognition, these banners are large enough to display additional information about your company, specials or other information as to why the consumer should choose you over your competitors.

What does the paid promotional services cost ?

A complete rate sheet is available; Costs range from $150 for a one month trial to $20,000 for a complete saturation campaign. On average, however, an ISP can do a very effective promotion and highlighting campaign for about $3,000 for a year. This cost is highlighted because most major daily newspapers or trade journals will cost far more than that on a weekly or monthly basis. CanadianISP knows that long term advertising is the most effective and we have made our prices affordable to the point that your name is in lights for far longer for your dollar than you will find in other media types.

What kind of traffic does CanadianISP get ? How many people will see my ISP ?

At present (January, 2011), CanadianISP is averaging over 30,000 page views per month. While this is not the billion pages per month of Google, CanadianISP is a highly targeted site: We do not offer non-ISP information - We do not even offer IT/Computer general information on the site: People visit CanadianISP for one reason and one reason only: To find a new ISP to switch their home or business to.

Our peak traffic times are Monday to Friday, 9 AM to 4 PM, with traffic dropping off between 11:PM to 8:30 AM. This means that your ISP is being exposed not only to the residential end user, but is being done so in a business/office environment, during traditional business hours.

Why do you want an owner/senior managers' email ? Are you going to spam me ?

We ask for a person with a position of responsibility for your ISPs image to submit their email, which is never, ever given to third parties or shown to the public for several reasons:

  1. It is the address your user ID and password is sent to, should you ever forget it
  2. It is the address that queries from us, CanadianISP, are sent to, should their be questions about your business
  3. It is the address that the (approximately) quarterly newsletters are sent out to

We keep our communications to the ISPs pertinent and relevant to the industry, along with site news about CanadianISP. Approximately two to five times a year, you may receive a paid promotional email where a vendor has paid CanadianISP to broadcast to all of you, however these are heavily vetted by us for interest on your part. You may also, from time to time, receive a notice of an ISP that is for sale or interest of acquisition. In each and every case this has happened through CanadianISP, the acquisition of the ISP was not only completed far, far faster than through regular channels, but the acquisition price was far better than originally anticipated by the originating ISP. (It's a competitive industry, to say the least!)

Will I ever be obligated to pay money to CanadianISP ? Will I be removed if I don't ?

No.

There is the short answer.

While we are in business to make money, just as you are, we realize that many ISPs operate on a very, very tight budget - especially when it comes to marketing. You will never be obligated to spend a dime with CanadianISP. In fact, 90% of the ISPs listed use the free service. Of course, business being business, the 10% who do use promotional services see a lot more customers head their way, simply because they are always visible in customer searches. The advertising really and literally does pay for itself within the first year.

What are the effects of advertising on CanadianISP ?

Stats showing the effects of using - and stopping - advertising

This is a traffic, clickthrough and detail view graph, from Jan 1, 2010 to Aug 8, 2010, of an ISP that serves the Golden Triangle region of Ontario.
You can see two significant drops in traffic: The first, to the left, is when the ISP let it's data go "stale", i.e. didn't update its' details for over a year: In this case, the search engine does not display the ISP by default in search results, instead relying on users to click on "Show all ISPs, including those with data over a year old".

The second dip is when the ISP decided not to renew their advertising, which consisted of guaranteed rank and a banner: You can see that the ISPs detail views - and more important to all of you: The clickthroughs dropped back down to typical levels for free-listed ISPs. This is simply because free-listed ISPs are displayed in completely random order (so as not to give advantage to ISPs starting with "A" as opposed to "Z"). They're still getting views and clickthroughs, by all means, but no where close to the levels when they were in the top of the results.

This is absolutely typical of results on CanadianISP. There has never, ever been an urban-area serving ISP who, after listing themselves in the top ten, did not see a massive jump in both traffic and paying customers.

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