Classified Ads View-to-Click Ratio

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.