Thursday, June 4, 2015

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.

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