The idea for the service was pretty simple. Given most folks:

• don’t find enough information in a print ad (or post card or classified sites like craigslist) to satisfy their curiosity, and
• don’t want to call a salesperson for basic facts and photos

…they will take the path of least resistance (visit the property web site) for more information on the listing.

If you provide that sites address in the ad, you can track it and compare which mediums work best. Since most web addresses are too unwieldy to work in offline advertising and web analytics programs can’t track the source when an address it typed directly into the web browser, listingnumber, was born.

With enough agents using the service to track their ads (craigslist, newspaper, post cards, flyers, email campaigns, etc.), we should be able to do a bit of data mining, to extract out averages across agents and their listings and provide some meaningful data back to the community. So that said, here are some preliminary results.

Average Visits Per Campaign

We need to dig much much deeper into the data to draw any real conclusions here. For example, I’m not sure if agents are creating a new, unique tracking code per craigslist ad. Ads expire each week, so they need to be recreated. While this is true for the newspaper as well, we need to dig deeper to understand the usage patterns of the service so we are doing a fair comparison.

The more meaningful numbers of course are not the raw visits, but the cost-per-visit. For example, if the cost to place a craigslist ad (given it’s free to post) is simply the time spent, we can use an agents hourly rate of say, $100/hr @ 30 minutes and estimate the ad cost at $50. At that rate, craigslist traffic averages $0.50 per visit. Potentially much less expensive than keyword advertising and assuming less than half a visit per newspaper ad run (regardless of the cost per ad), insanely less than the newspaper.

We’ll share more raw numbers and analysis as they become available.

Thanks,