Classified Hits

my SL business partners and i spend over 20k L$ a month on the classified ads. we would like to be able to access figures for how often it was viewed and particularly how often it was teleported to. we needs metrics to guage the value of the service. asap.

how do others feel about this? do you find the lack of data might be creating a false perception over the worth or lack of worth of classified ads amongst users?

Absolutely, 100% agree. I don't spend that much on my classifieds but I had a weird experience last week. I consolidated my stores into one location only to realize that it was NOT my classifieds that was bringing me the traffic to one of the locations BUT the location itself. If there were any metrics presents on how many referreals I get from Classifieds, this miscalculation would have never happened.

Now I am all trying to make plans for the move back. lol talk about backtracking as fast as you can.

lol

Troy

...

Hear, hear, Wu. Completely agree.

Having impression and clickthrough figures for classifieds would be very helpful indeed.

Currently, the only metric I can track for classifieds is conversions. I do this by making a sealed, secret store in the sky that no one will ever see unless they click through my ad in classifieds.

Not a perfect solution, but the closest I can come to approximating the sorts of important ROI figures I'm used to within an online marketing effort.

You can subdivide out a little parcel with its own teleport location, and track visitors to it to generally find teleports. There is a fancier way involving collision detection on landing.

I've never bothered. Classifieds are good but honestly, the difference between a $L 50 classified and a $L1500 classified is minimal, as far as I've seen. People are smart and search around a lot.

"Find" is the real powertool here; so powerful I wonder if it will be phased out someday.

I've never been one to spend $L 15000 on a classified; I'm not running any kind of business that would much benefit from that.

This data would be of high value to anyone using the classifieds for anything. Which leads me to belive the reason we won't have access to it is the cost of storing the information. DB access traffic and all that rot

But, here's hoping anyway.

This is a great feature idea but requires a scripted query that interfwell yeah that seems doable.

So it will either not be acknowleged at all or promised in the next release but never actually appear.

Am I wrong?

These features would be invaluable, but considering that we can't even get an auto-renew button on the Classified, unlikely.

I think SAP will solve your issues.

Completely agreed Wu. I've stopped using them altogether for two reasons: no metrics, and the stupid need to renew the damn thing every two weeks! ARGH!

I suspect they're much less effective than people would think. I include honest metrics on SLB banners and people always find them incredibly low (less than 1 click through per 200 impressions most of the time), until I point them to Internet-wide click through and conversion rates! Besides, we only charge L$1 for 10 impressions. If you're just getting started it can help get your products on the map.

Regards,

-Flip

You're scary.

I will just say that anyone who has ever complained about Second Life's user interface would be singing its praises if they had ever had to use SAP.

As far as classifieds go... I only used 'em once, and ended up in this weird store that wasn't where I expected to be. I won't say any more than that...

I'd love to see some stats for classified hits and resulting ports. Personally I notice a big difference in sales between times when I don't have an ad up and when I do, but it would be great to have more concrete data.

I am glad you got the joke.

My suggestion is that LL offer this for a nominal fee (to be paid in USD). That will enable them to make more money.

Yes lets have bi-weekly auctions and the top ten bidders will get basic stats for the next month and the top five can have the option of reserving additional stats for the second month whether they participate in the next round or not.

I look at classified ads on sl in a ascending ratio. Thsoe who paid the least I see first.

jaime, i think they make more money by not offering the data. i think as sl's top economical mind, you know this.

NO. let's have bi-weekly stats for everyone. for all ads. information wants to be free.

I agree, stats would be great!

Another question or three: Why do we have Find Places? And what about stats for that if it is sticking around? Does anyone use Find Places to find a place?

I would like to know stats as well. I never post for such high amounts of money, I'm usually in the middle around L$1500 simply because I don't find that paying out L$20k is going to make that much of a difference. Having some information to go by would help me know for certain.

I look at it from the point of view of 'how would *I* look through classifieds - online or a newspaper.

I doubt folks go to ebay and look at every single item - they probably have a good idea of what they're after.

So I look at what I'm doing - and start searching classifieds for my own things, make notes on the key words I'm using, and the prices that come up at those keywords - after that I set a price based on that - does it put me around the middle of the page on big listings? if so - cool!

I keep my shop listing going all the time, and when I release something new - or notice a product is 'forgotten' I'll put up a cheapy classifed for that too.. all up the total I spend per week on all classifieds is under 1000.

I *may* do a volume detect prim and set a diff teleport spot for classifieds, just to keep a count of how many come to my place from them and see how that goes.

Yeah, well most people dont.

That'll give you clickthroughs, but you won't get the important metric, conversions, unless you're teleporting to an entirely different store.

SL is cool and all, but it's missing some shit that the web is very good at, like tracking visitor behavior.

Wouldn't mind a cookie mechanism in the client.

edit: Actually, if you're using a vendor, you could get conversions after all, come to think of it. Say your volumedetect object E-Mails a central server with a name/key, a location and the name of the campaign that drove the traffic for each detected avatar. Then, when a sale goes down, your vendor queries the server with the name of the customer who just purchased, and if there's a match, you know you have a classifieds-driven conversion.

Interesting.

You'd just have to find some way to ensure that it was unlikely someone would touch your detector object without having actually used the classified ad.

To find places

As opposed to classified listings.

A lot of people don't participate in classifieds, and want people to be able to search a database to find their land.



Not so much of an issue I would have thought, as Find isn't used to sell a product and such.



A most definate YES.


When I used to have a home I listed it in find, so my friends could find it etc. It also automatically deducts the fee, as opposed to having to log in to renew it.

hehe you're over thinking it dude.

I put a 16 x 16 block off to one side near the road.. I have my regular teleport where it is.. all my vendor boxes end in an abbreviation based on where they are (only one of 3 locations anyways)

Sales info tells me how much I made.. traffic tells me how popular it was - lil cube tells me about how many people arrived via classifieds.

All I need to know is 'is anyone comeing because of classifieds' if I get a few hits on the old box I can say 'yes'.

Thats all I need to know.. if 2 people come and buy something my classified pretty much pays for itself.

if 20 people come via classifieds it doesn't matter if they bought something or not.