Archive for: February 2008

After being live with our CoolTea Classifieds for over 30-days, I was curious to see what the view-to-click ratio was for the ads that you see along the right side of your screen when viewing the classified listings.

Turns out the number is just a little bit higher than traditional direct mail responses.

In the old days with direct mail (analog materials with real postage circa mid 1980s), getting a two percent return was considered a good thing. Meaning if you sent out 10,000 brochures to a targeted list, you could expect two percent or 200 recipients of your mailing to respond to your offer (e.g., call you, mail in the tear-off, etc.).

Today there are many new advertising and direct marketing models springing forth - some are bogus in my opinion and others are really exciting. For example, Google ad-words is something most people know about and is a system that leverage PPC (pay-per-click) and pay-per-views.

I’d love to hear from some of you PPC experts about what you think is a good ratio for you and your clients so in the spirit of sharing, I’ll go first and share the following as a data-point.

In the first month of CoolTea Classifieds running the small banner ads you see on the right, not the text listings, but the blinking, rotating graphic ads with links, on average each ad in our database was viewed by 4,000 people and generated 127 click throughs.

Thus these ads achieved a 3.175% click response (127clicks/4000views) - not bad for the first month.

Moral of the story IMHO, fifty-bucks per month is a bargain price for classified ads that brand your message to 4000 and generate 127 people clicking into your site / offer.

In my previous post, I mentioned how and why CoolTea created a backend process to decline inappropriate Classified Listings. Well, we also had the reverse issue and needed to develop an admin system to extend and renew various classified listings - anywhere from an added 30 days to an additional 6 months.

Here’s why - when we came out of the gate with our new classified application, we were uncertain as to the volume of listings that might ensue. Part of good web design is planning for scaleability - thus too much success can bring down a site just as easily as failures in bad code, bad design, wrong business models, etc. Thus part of good web architecture is planning for accordion growth - e.g., how do you scale up with demand, and/or, how do you scale down to keep the burn rate (money) manageable, thus in this case we thought a 30 day cap on listings would be a good balance.

But then something interesting occurred and that was the bulk of the listings posted were for time-insensitive services - meaning photographers and writers and personal trainers, their listings were not date sensitive like a “job wanted” listing which expires as soon as the company hires a suitable candidate.

Thus the question became, how could CoolTea be of better value to our customers creating service listings? After all, it seemed silly to ask people to come back every month and recreate or renew their own listing just because we put a 30-day time stamp on it to protect ourselves from floods of posts.

Voila - the answer was akin to declines - create code that shows listings that are about to expire and allows are admins to determine if the listings are appropriate for renewal, and if so, determine how many months or days would be appropriate extension to add to the listings, then automatically extend those listings.

So even though we still say, “listings are valid for 30-days” - don’t be surprised to find that if you create a good listing that is not time-sensitive, that as a professional courtesy our admins will extend it for you so you continue to experience additional exposure.

When we first announced CoolTea Classifieds, it never occurred to me that we would also have to develop a backend admin system to help with the process of declining listings.

From the start, we knew that we wanted to keep our classifieds with high-signal and low-noise ratio thus avoid some of the noise you see from other free listing sites - e.g., all the condos for sale, sex hook-ups wanted, get rich quick schemes, etc.

We figured since our system stated “Business-centric por favor”, required valid email address to confirm and used captcha (graphics/numbers used for forms to deter robots), we thought it would be the occasional listing that would slip through that would be addressed via an occasional email from one of our admins.

But even I was surprised at the volume of people trying to post some of these listings. Not there is anything wrong with selling condos, looking to get some, or attempting to get rich, but there are other, more appropriate places on the web for those kinds of listings, especially considering our goal with CoolTea Classifieds is to hold a business-centric emphasis - one that benefits the artists, entrepreneurs, and small businesses in our communities.

So shortly after launch, we developed an automated backend system to help people understand why their listings were declined and here are the reason codes as fyi:

• Code 01 - Missing Contact Information
  Your listing did not contain any viewable contact information - e.g., no phone number, email and/or web address to contact for more information. Note that while you supplied an email address when you created your classified listing, your email is never listed on the site unless you include it in the body of your classified listing description. Next steps - Create a new listing with contact info, and it will be promptly approved for publishing … FYI - If you do list your email address in your classified listing description, we recommend that you do it so spam robots don’t easily harvest your email address — hence showing your email as myname at mydomain dot com is better than listing it as myname@mydomain.com. Alternatively, myname [at] mydomain.com also works in making it easy to read by humans but more difficult for spam robots to harvest.
• Code 02 - Better Suited as Event Listing
  Your listing contained date-sensitive material and is better suited for Event Calendar Listing and not a Classified Listing. Currently, CoolTea currently provides free event listings - see http://cooltea.com/listmyevent/
• Code 03 - Real Estate Focused
  You can promote your real estate site and your real estate services, but you cannot promote properties. Exceptions can be made for studios and home offices on a case-by-case basis. If market demands grow in this dept, new real estate categories and/or dedicated property classifieds might be developed … to be continued …
• Code 04 - Multi-level Marketing
  MLM (multi-level marketing) listings are mostly prohibited because there are so many of the same kind - e.g., when we first announced CoolTea Classifieds we had dozens of similar listings for get rich quick, sell vacation condos, promote video emails, etc., that we had to create this Code 04 policy to insure that listings from artists, entrepreneurs, and small businesses would not be overrun.
• Code 05 - Bad Debts
  The organization referenced in your listing has an outstanding debt with CoolTea, and we therefore cannot in good faith publish your listing.
• Code 06 - PPC Portal
  The web address you specified goes to a search portal that appears to be a PPC (pay-per-click) model, thus the links and content are thin and not likely of value for our customers. Furthermore, for the similar reason we decline MLM (multi-level marketing) listings, PPC listings are mostly prohibited because there are so many of the same kind - e.g., when we first announced CoolTea Classifieds we had dozens of similar listings for get rich quick, sell vacation condos, promote video emails, etc., that we had to create this policy to insure that listings from artists, entrepreneurs, and small businesses would not be overrun.