in the classifieds section in the newspaper and have it point to my website. I have adsense on my page and its very well blended. It's a very sought after item and the newspaper has a circulation of a 1.3mil think. Problem is its 300 bucks for a weeks run, so I'm a little cautious about trying something new. Anyone have any pointers? Assuming I do go ahead with it, and it works out well, how will G feel about having no refferal? Ehh I'm anxious to hear people's stories about thier advertising experiences with classified ads. Should I take the risk and spend the 300? ~J
You aren't going to have problems because of no refferal. I have a url on a receipt from a brick and mortar store that results in a large percentage of type-ins. $300 for a week a business ad in a paper with 1.3 mil circulation sounds very cheap. I know a NY Times owned paper that charges a premium for business ads AND ads with a url. 1.3 million is a big number but of course only a small fraction of a percent will read the ad and then go to the site. I'm sure it can work with the right set of circumstances but the only way to find out is run it. My guess is that it would not work in most cases and that you will almost certainly need to make adjustments to maximize your return or even recover your investment. I used to have a company that spent high six-figures a year in media advertising and you really needed to have a long-term approach (repeat customers) to justify almost any type of campaign - tv, print, radio, etc. You could also try running the ad in a paper with a smaller circulation and then extrapolate those results before running it in a larger paper.
yah I agree, the first launch of this site made really good money. But as of now I think I got smartpriced (dont know why the clickthrough rate is good) but I figured it out that If i was to run a offline campaign. I will need 1000 clicks to break even. Thats not including the affiliate links that seem to do well. Now weather I will get 1000 clicks from a Newspaper with 1.3mil circulation is another thing.
If you are already making good money from adsense then try it. Figure your click through rate together with the 1k clicks needed and you will know your traffic needed. I have a web hosting customer who I just did a dog website for. I put him up a site based on one of the simple cms programs out there so he could post his own photos and stuff. He breeds/sells the big poodles. He has had an ad in three small papers running for about a week. The ads are both online and in the regular papers. He has been getting about 300 visitors (uniques) per day from this. This sort of blew me away. I never would have thought it would work but he has sold 5k worth of poodle pups in a week from this. He thinks I'm some sort of website god now, HA HA. He knows lots of local business people so I am getting lots of good word of mouth from this. ###
Keep in mind when calculating Click Thrus/conversion: Anyone who will go through the trouble of typing in your URL will be *very* targeted. If I am not extremely interested in the subject, I am very unlikely myself to go through the effort to manually type in a URL. I can see it being worth it. But rather than just a classified ad, I would work with other types of advertising. For example, if you sold widgets, put up flyers in the local hardware store. Flyers in the subway work well as well.
believe me, advertsiing in classifieds in the newspaper can bring you lots of traffic. whether targeted or not, that's a different story.