General

A site this size obviously has running costs and these are covered by taking paid advertising. The types of advertising available are described below. With all adverts you are able to view statistics showing how many times your adverts has been shown and how many times visitors have clicked on your advert.

There are deliberately few rules as to who can advertise on the site, adverts don't have to relate to Wales for example. However, adverts will not be accepted for pornographic web sites, get-rich-quick schemes or anything that is deliberately vague or obtuse in order to generate sales contacts.

Why Advertise on the Wales Index?

The Wales Index is the world's largest directory of Welsh web sites, attracting around 8,000 distinct visitors per day and showing around 1.2 million pages per month (these figures exclude spider and robot traffic). For just £2.50 per week (minimum 2 weeks), your advert can be shown to this audience with the minimum of effort.

Unlike many other sites the cost is based on time, not on the number of people who click on your advert. There are a couple of reasons for this, the first being that some advertisers prefer to show a telephone number rather than a clickable web site address or email link. The second reason is that with pay-per-click advertising there is always a suspicion that somebody is clicking your advert repeatedly just to be rotten. Paying for your advert to be shown for a fixed time is more akin to advertising in a newspaper or magazine and is felt to be fairer and generally easier to maintain.

It is difficult to say what interest your advert will generate, it depends on what you are advertising and how you are advertising it apart from anything else. As a guide, most adverts generate 20-30 clickthroughs per week, which works out at between 8p and 13p per clickthrough. Visitors to the Wales Index site are a mixture of local residents, ex-patriots and tourists, not necessarily in that order. The site has been running since 1999 and paid advertising has been carried since June 2002.

Submitting Adverts

The general procedure for submitting adverts is as follows:

1. Complete the appropriate online submission form (see below). If you have not already registered as a user you will be taken through this procedure first.
2. The webmaster will review your advert to make sure it is: a) correctly completed, and b) appropriate. If there is a problem with the advert then you will be emailed with the details.
3. Once accepted, you will be sent an email with payment instructions. Click on the link in the email or log into your user profile and you will be taken to the Worldpay secure site where you can make your payment. Most credit and debit cards are accepted and for your security we do not get to see your card details at any time. Exceptionally, payment can be made by other means. Please contact the webmaster for details.
4. As soon as your payment is accepted your advert will be made live automatically.

Refund Policy

Adverts start to be shown immediately payment is made. Every effort will be made to address complaints and queries but we regret that refunds will only be offered where there is a major variation in the service we are offering.

Text Advertising

This is the most popular form of advertising, probably because it is the easiest to set up. Text adverts can be up to 300 characters long (around 50 words) and are shown in a highly prominent position across the top of each page. Adverts are welcome in either English or Welsh, or both, but the 300 character limit applies. To submit an advert, just complete the text advert submission form. This service is not limited to businesses of course, if you are willing to pay then you can use it.

Adverts must contain contact details of some form or other. This can be either a web site address, email address or telephone number. In the case of a web site address or email address, these will be shown as clickable links within your advert and you are allowed up to three per advert.

Please note that these adverts are not targeted at specific pages of the site, they are shown in random rotation across the entire site. Although not targeted, this does result in each advert being shown a vastly larger number of times.

Banner Advertising

Graphic banners are the traditional form of advertising on the web. They can be animated, colourful and eye-catching, but of course require someone with graphic design skills to create them in the first place. There are fewer banners in rotation on the Wales Index site because of this, so if you take this route your banner will be shown that many more times as a result.

Banners must be sized 468x60 pixels and hosted in your own web space. Flash animations can also be accommodated. To submit an banner, just complete the banner advert submission form.

Please note that these adverts are not targeted at specific pages of the site, they are shown in random rotation across the entire site. Although not targeted, this does result in each advert being shown a vastly greater number of times.

Highlighted Directory Entries

This option is not available yet but is under development and should be live in May 2008. If you have a web site listed in the main web directory, you will be able to pay a small fee for this entry to be highlighted and appear at the top of the categories in which it is listed (they are currently shown in a random order which is varied every 24 hours).