Are expensive classified ads worth the cost?

Edit: I moved this information to the other post at:
/142/fc/226678/1.html

I'm wondering in anyone else has tried measuring the results of a more expensive classified advertisement?

My business income is down significantly from last year at this time. It now takes an entire week to make what I was earning per day last year. There is lots more competition, more stores, more listings in land and classifieds to compete with, making it harder for people to find my store. So I have been considering the benefits of advertising more seriously.

I previously had two L$50 classified ads. Checking out the ads I found that if I placed an ad at L$9,000 per week, it would move my listing from the last page to the first page of the classifieds. So I decided to try it for a week and see what happened.

Here is a comparison of the sales results after one week.

Sales 11/23-11/29 = $10,563 <--- w/ L$50 classified
Sales 11/30-12/6 = $11,964 <--- w/ L$9,000 classified

So I clearly lost money, almost a weeks worth of income.

The L$9,000 classified generated the following traffic:
63 tp, 3 map, 3 profile

In order for me to have broken even on the cost of the classifieds, all 63 people who teleported to my store would have had to spend L$143.

From my perspective the expensive classified ad was a looser. Has anyone else had a different experience?

Hi Ron,

Does your ad appear on page one of the old classified tab only? It might not appear at all in the new search.

There are several big threads going on over this issue, particularly Cristalle's "would you spend more than 50L?" thread. Go to page 5 and respond to James Linden's request for comments. And thanks for reporting your findings. James clearly understands business owners' anger over the changes to search which have rendered the paid classified system a ripoff, which is why he is trying to figure out how to fix it.

--Avion

What I do is spread my advertising budget around more. There are many sims out there with advertising board systems that you can rent. You just have to take the time to explore and research. Check their demographics and make sure they attract the audience that woud purchase your products. In camping areas you can rent ad space telling new players about some free item you have for them.

I never pay more than $50L for a classified - but the new search that highlights the top 4 priced classified will definitely make it much harder for small business to compete.

Thanks Avion, I did not see that other thread until I had already posted this one. I will go add this information to it.

Lias, those are good ideas, thanks.

I don't think too highly of those that place 100k+ classifieds...
For one there was or IS (not sure if it is still around) that allowed you to auto renew your classified w/o ever paying for it again... I know many people that took advantage of this at one point, and again rather it is fixed or not I don't know.

I personally have never had an ad for more than 2k and mostly stick to the L$50 ads, because I see no other purpose than to "be listed"

I was curious a few times and checked out some of the other places with these high classifieds and good portion of them had me wondering why they would invest in such crap... so now when I do searches it has nothing to do with how much they pay and where they rank.. Often times I will start at the bottom in hopes to find something/someone new doing something amazing that I hadn't seen before.

Understand? Then why is he beta testing a new search at the business owners expense? Why is there even any beta testing on the main grid?

Because there are not enough sims or users on the beta grid. A search needs to be load tested in order to work and they simply can't put a load big enough on the beta grid to break it.

I've found that the 50L ad works just fine for me and so too does simply wandering the grid with the place in my picks.

How is there any reasonable way to test it? I know it's rough, but there is no way to test it reasonably, when few people ever download the RCs except "power users" like us who actually take the time to read the blog. The audience Search All is directed is clearly not us.

I'm not saying it was a good idea. I'm saying that his posting on page 5 of Cristalle's thread shows that he now "understands" that there is a serious problem with the paid classified system.

Now is definitely not the time to beat him up for it. I for one am thrilled to death that he publicly took responsibility and is soliciting comments on how to fix it.