Giving Auction Advertisements more Exposure through Classified Ad Listings

Trying to figure out a way to give print centric advertisements more exposure on a website can be difficult. We have faced this problem for years, but now have developed a cool way to give real estate or used equipment auctions better exposure. Our classified ads’ website software allows a media company to post an auction with a text description and list unlimited items with the auction.

The cool part is the items categorization process for an auction advertisement. Each time the user loads a picture, they give it a name and select a classification. Since our software now knows the classification, the items not only show on the auction detail page, but also show in the corresponding category for the classification. This allows buyers searching a particular category on our website to find items that are going to be auctioned. Before this software update, items that were going to be auctioned only displayed on a single auction detail page. The old process limited the exposure of the items.

This new feature gives auctioneers more exposure for their auctions while helping classified ad websites build more content. We have posted below an image of our website’s list view page showing an auction item. When the user clicks the item labeled Auction Item, it  takes them to the Auction Ad Detail page.

Facebook Ads and Google Adwords Cost Compared to Print Advertising

Our media company publishes 6 weekly local shopper publications reaching over 83,000 homes. We publish a monthly agricultural magazine which  focuses heavily on the marketing of new and used equipment and land auctions. We work with thousands of small business each year; and along with our own experience using Facebook and Google have formed the following thoughts.

It has been well documented that Google’s SERP is filled with paid advertisements. Google Adwords work great for businesses selling products online, but offline businesses don’t receive the same value in most cases. Service businesses might benefit, but the cost is still high compared to advertising in a publication like ours. We evaluated four different ad campaigns. The cost per click (CPC) ranged from $.74 for our horizontal classified ad website to over $1.47 per click when advertising an available manufacturing building. Per thousand, the $.74 is 74 times greater than a color quarter page ad in our publications, which cost $.01 to reach over 83,000 homes. The $.01 doesn’t represent a click, but two things should be considered. A click on a Google Adword does not guarantee a sale, and an ad, in our publications, has to only work 1 out of every 74 times to equal the results of Adwords; and if the ratio is better than 1 out of 74, the publication delivers a greater return for the advertiser.

Facebook is racing Google to give small businesses way too many advertising metrics to cloudy the water. Facebook is lost when it comes to how they want local businesses to measure their ROI derived from the amount of money the business spends on Facebook advertising. Our Ads Reporting screen in Facebook has 14 columns with different metrics. Facebook gives advertisers this much information not because all the figures look good, but to hopefully return one number the small business sees beneficial. Small businesses mostly care about direct results, which means they want clicks on Facebook. Facebook offers campaigns based on impressions (CPM), but most small businesses do not have the budget to focus on image advertising.

We compared CPC for Facebook to Google and found the following: Facebook CPC were $.17, which is a lot lower than Google Adwords, but 17 times higher than a quarter page ad in our weekly publications. Page Likes were vogue when Facebook was new, but now Facebook only shows your posts organically to a small percentage of people that Like your page. I intentionally use the words “small percentage” because it continues to drop. One post we used several times dropped from 501 organic impressions on March 28th to 47 on June 7th. The content of the post did not change between those two dates.

You can’t blame Facebook for transitioning from a free marketing platform to a model that requires businesses to pay. They have shareholders to please and must drive their profits higher every quarter. They also must cut down the fire hose of information being fed into users’ feeds. As written earlier, Facebook allows business pages to create campaigns based on impressions. Our test using multiple variations of ads based on impressions returned results of $17.35 per thousand for unique people reached on Facebook. We would compare Facebook’s unique people reached to unique homes reached for our publications. Our cost of $13.36 per thousand homes reached is 23% lower than Facebook’s cost per thousand for unique people reached.

Facebook and Google both provide advertisers great tools for targeting ads to very specific groups of people. However, the cost per thousand for clicks and impressions in our test were exceedingly higher than advertising in our print publications. Advertisers should also consider, when comparing costs, the figures used above don’t account for the cost to manage and design campaigns for Google and Facebook, whereas, our cost includes design and printing. You can create your own ads, but you will then have to learn how their programs work, which is a cost and can be complicated. We would like to hear feedback that is not in line with our findings.

Mobile Traffic to a Rural Classified Ad Website

For small media companies located in mostly rural described markets, the best model for a classified website is not as clear as in a dense urban setting. Craigslist first changed the classified ad marketplace in cities; but more recently, vertical marketplaces have been able to disrupt Craigslist. Airbnb used Craigslist's user base as leads to build their successful accommodation vertical marketplace. There are others taking bites out of Craigslist's dominance, but only time will tell if they can succeed in urban settings. One could argue for similar reasons a Best Buy business model doesn't work in a town of 11,000 people, relates to the same reasons most vertical websites will not work in rural America. That is why we are excited about the opportunity and investment we are making in our horizontal local marketplace. Local media companies can still provide the best service and marketplace for their local area.

While local media companies don't have to worry as much about new marketplaces, they need to be very aware of technology user trends. In the last two years, we have seen mobile traffic overtake desktop traffic to our horizontal marketplace, Exchange931.com. The disparity between mobile and desktop traffic will only continue to grow.  Mobile traffic to our horizontal marketplace in the last 30 days accounted for 60% of our total traffic and has increased 99% compared to the same 30 days one year ago. Responsive design is critical to meet this traffic change in user behavior. This traffic change is not an anomaly or centered in one type of area but seen across the country.

Google and Bing both recently made announcements affecting the way their search engines will view websites. They both said over time, websites that have mobile friendly pages will return higher in search results. While the impact from Google's change hasn't greatly been seen yet, any website owner that is not working toward making sure all pages are mobile friendly will be left behind. Google has given the warning. These changes by Google and Bing make sense. Users don't want to visit websites that require them to constantly zoom in and out on their mobile devices to view content. Website owners should not want this requirement either because the user will leave with a poor experience which means less reoccurring traffic.

Mobile websites used to be the first step to provide a good user experience. Today's websites should be designed using technology that makes the website responsive which better addresses mobile. Responsive design ensures the user will have a website that is easy to use on any device. Tablet traffic to Exchange931.com has increased 26% compared to the same time last year. Before responsive design, our website would have been limited to a mobile and desktop version, which wouldn't address tablet or devices with screen sizes in between. With responsive design, we can easily create one version of our website that conforms to the screen size of the user's device. The long term cost of maintaining a responsive designed website is lower than maintaining a website that has a dedicated mobile and desktop version.

Over 50% percent of U.S. consumers own a smartphone and the percentage is increasing fast. Don't be left behind wondering what happened the same way daily newspapers did when Craigslist destroyed their classified ads' section. Make sure your 2015 plans include responsive design for your local marketplace website.

Rural Markets are Underserved

Craigslist disrupting the classified industry is well-documented and can be seen through the demise of classified revenue of daily newspapers.. While Craigslist has had a profound impact on urban areas, rural markets are still underserved. We have seen this first hand because of the increase in our website traffic the last year. Our website traffic is up 39% the last 30 days, year over year. We haven't released  earth shattering technology, but yet we have seen great growth. We have seen great growth because we have given our area a local platform. We  locally connect producers and consumers as well as service providers with those that need services.

Our print product is the leading driver to our growth online, coupled with a platform that has more technology supporting it than is visually apparent. We have spent over four years building our platform without taking one month off from improving the software functions. We have evolved the platform over that time period to address the wants of today's search engines and mobile users. I specifically say mobile because over half our traffic is now mobile and our responsive design gives the mobile user a fully optimized experience while using our website.

We had a photo problem at first because most of our online listings to start came from our print product. We solved this problem with two different software functions. The first is an email that is sent to the customer that placed the classified ad when their ad goes live on our website. The email asks the user to respond to the email with photos of their listing. This has had great response because it is simple to use. The user can simply take a picture with their mobile phone and reply to the email with the picture attached. Our software will automatically add the photo to their classified ad. The other cool feature is the ability for a consumer to click the location of where photos appear on a ad detail page which triggers an email to the seller requesting a photo. The combination of these features has lead to a more than 2,415 photos being added to our marketplace and has consequently given shoppers a much better experience.

The next wave of disrupters are being funded hundreds of millions of dollars every month from private equity. Some of them will succeed because they find a market that is underserved or that meets the requirements for their platform or marketplace to succeed. However, many will fail because they don't have the local knowledge and trust that our brands provide our markets. We have the advantage of learning from the successes and failures of these new technology companies and we will use their successes to our advantage. Their success is a blueprint for our company to use to build a better product to serve our local community.