Archive for: February 19, 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.