Does craigslist have the Highest Return on Your Advertising Dollar (Lowest Cost per Visitor)?
One of the ideas I got really excited about when we launched listingnumber was that, given broad enough usage, we’d be able to draw some interesting insights, if not conclusions regarding the comparative effectiveness of differing advertising mediums. With better data, you can make more informed decisions regarding where to spend your advertising dollar (and in the case of the “free” services, your time).
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
| Campaign |
Average # of Visits
|
| craigslist |
26
|
| eFlyers |
2.8
|
| Post Cards |
1.4
|
| Signs |
0.4
|
| Newspaper |
0.3
|
Figure 1. Average visits per marketing campaign. Source: listingnumber.com internal analysis.
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,
{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }
[...] for the cross-post with the listingnumber blog, but I’m so excited about this I had to write about it [...]
Based on what you have shown here, it certainly appears that Craigslist is delivering more eyeballs to listings than the other methods of advertising. As you mention, it would probably be worthwhile to audit the implementation.
Is there any data whether visitors who come via Craigslist are more or less likely to engage services than those who come via a newspaper advertisement? It would be useful to see the bounce rates and conversion rates for the visitors by source as well. Getting beyond the cost-per-eyeball and getting to cost-per-action is the Holy Grail for making informed choices in advertising venues.
For example, if the newspaper visitors convert at a rate that is higher than Craigslist visitors then the newspaper may be providing more value.
ListingNumber is an great tool, btw. Thanks so much for making it. As a TinyUrl with RE specific analytics (and potentially branding power if more people use it in their print media) it kicks ass.
G. Dewald asked:
Baby steps, my friend
. We do have a couple products in the pipeline that get to this, however, in order to make it totally hands-free for the agent (and thus, actually *used*), we would need to control the web site from start to finish. There are so many great providers out there already (such as yourself), that I’m not sure we want to be in that business. Instead, we are inclined to take a ‘widget’ approach that would allow us to do the tracking on any site.
In the meantime, we are working on a reporting tool that would allow the agents who already do collect this data from various sources to at least report on it in a consolidated fashion. The idea might look something like this:
Borrowing heavily from the funnel report in Google Analytics, the idea is that the agent gets a simple input screen where they can input the raw numbers from the various disparate sources (google analytics, the MLS keybox report, calls they’ve logged etc.) and after inputting, generate this report (as well as track comparative results over time).
Not perfect and would require a bit of ongoing work, but much closer to the Holy Grail than simply tracking visits.
All that said, I’d be ecstatic if a tiny percentage of the real estate population simply knew their visits generated. At least that would get a healthy conversation going that might challenge the (still) prevalent assumptions about the value of print advertising.
BTW – I saw your talk on analytics at Inman and was extremely impressed with your deep understanding of the topic.
Thanks for the compliment!
If I can help you out in any way on making the data flow piece from GA through your tool let me know. I think I’m going to work up a tutorial on combining GA campaign tracking with listingnumber (ideal world might have campaign/source/medium options in creation of the listingnumber).
Anyway, fabulous tool and I’ll be recommending it heavily.
Thanks for the offer. I’ll take you up on that when I’m ready.
One idea I had was to flow the data the other way (from listingnumber to GA), by appending the “campaign” from listingnumber as the appropriate GA field (i.e. utm_source). I’d like to explore both.
Great feedback. Thanks again.
[...] One of the websites I mentioned at the Inman presentation a few weeks ago was listing number. One of the most interesting elements of the site is just how trivial it can make tracking ROI of an agents marketing spend… and along those lines, the folks behind Listing Number just published their first set of results for the average number of hits generated by different marketing types. [...]
Very good stuff regarding what really happens with advertising. I am just starting to use the google analytics and it is very different than what I think most people think about advertising. I am surprised with how many views it takes before you get any direct questions or an email.
Charlie
Charlie – With enough traffic we’ll get a baseline for how many visits it takes to generate an inquiry and how many inquiries a showing. There are all kinds of factors that can be adjusted to optimize once you have that baseline — from landing page optimization to response time and follow up skills.
Great Post! Craigslist is an excellent marketing medium for all Realtors. I also suggest that refer Craigslist to your sellers that are looking to sell their unwanted furniture before their move. Craigslist has a section to sell furniture which has been very helpful to my sellers.
Dustin: Would love to see a post on the best websites to market real estate to overseas buyers. I have tried many means to grab the International Buyers such as PropertyFinder.com and magazines like Homes Overseas. Any agents out there have other websites or publications that have brought in International clients?
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