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 RP 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 (meaning that these do not present suppliers) and miss other important places. For quickly getting a reliable overview of available suppliers, you need to use a high-quality buyer's guide (a human-curated resource) like ours.

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

Yes, some of them do that (although we would not recommend it — more reliable results are available on our platform). But if they use ChatGPT, Perplexity or similar, these very often grab the results from our pages, as they know that RP Photonics is very trusted and helpful source of information. As a result, product descriptions of our advertisers are processed by AI and presented to users that way. Therefore, the shift towards indirect use of our resource via AI systems does not destroy the value of our Advertising Package.

We also have a blog article on this topic.

That would be ideal, but not cost-effective and too labor-intensive. Therefore, advertisers usually focus on what they think works best and thus can result in best value for money and time.

When measuring the generated referral traffic to their website (which is the most important metric), they basically always find the RP Photonics platform to be far ahead of all others. With that alone, you reach a large part of the photonics buyers and secure a decent presence on the most trusted and respected platform.

We warmly recommend that you check your referral traffic. This is a good indication of 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 referral traffic.

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!)

Absolutely not. It is not relevant either for users or for advertisers that RP Photonics operates in Switzerland (Europe). Our resource is very popular worldwide; presumably, the vast majority of users doesn't care where we operate, and only happily uses the high-quality content.

Our website statistics also show that we have hardly less user traffic from North America than from Europe. Given that Europe has a larger population and a strong photonics industry, it would be more surprising if it were the other way round.

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 these products. 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 contains 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 advertising offers are thoroughly honest and trustworthy.

It is a proven fact that suppliers with the Advertising Package get far more referral traffic. You can see that 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 Advertising 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 Advertising 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 Advertising 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 the Advertising Package.

No, this is just one of the extras which you get with our Advertising Package. Our concept is to have a comprehensive package for everything, rather than charging for this and that separately.

We do not expect that, so we frankly do not promise it. For search engine optimization, you need to work on your own website. But we are very effective in driving high-quality traffic to your website as long as you have our Advertising Package.

If others make such SEO promises, we recommend not believing this. First of all, their own websites usually have such poor Google ranking that you cannot expect to inherit much from that. Second, Google does not like paid do-follow links.

The cost structure of our Advertising Package is very simple and fair: a base price plus a price for each product. For more details, see the page on the Advertising Package.

We do not charge any commissions on your sales. We do not intrude on your sales process, but simply send potential buyers to your website. It is then up to you to create long-lasting business relations directly with them.

Our prices are very competitive. When compared 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 compared 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 typically lower cost per click) — while the branding effect is also largely missing and service is minimal.
• Commission-based cost models, which we do not use, would substantially reduce your sales margins. In comparison, the RP Photonics way gives you a fixed cost without degrading your sales margins.

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 few hours 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 even to collect your product descriptions and images from your website!

You find the easy steps on the pages for free listings or the Advertising Package.

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

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

We will never try to trick you into buying anything. Instead, we generate great results, so that most of them happily prolong their entries year by year.

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 extend your enhancements at any time, e.g. add additional products. Just tell us what you need.

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