Using a classified newspaper to create traffic to your site?

What would you do if you had access to more than 150,000...

[bossmanty]

What would you do if you had access to more than 150,000 readers/week thru an offline classified newspaper?

[Lisa]

I would find it not useful. Online keyword based advertising is a MUCH BETTER! Online I expect to reach 1% to 2% of the people I target. Offline that number is much much lower.

[bossmanty]

If I failed to mention, the AD Space is FREE...

So I would assume it could be used for something...

[EliteWeb]

You may get a few hits, but unless its gonna make something or another grow larger or do something then its just ink on paper being useless. I've found it hard for people to have printed materials w/ web addresses come to a computer and check it out unless they are in front of the computer right then. And I never am ;)

[NFFC]

If you could back it up with a special offer and/or cataloge and man a phone number it could work. If you advertise offline you need to act offline, imho.

[tbear]

Bot of my latest clients use newspaper ads.
One (6 mths old site) now equals hits from the web and from papers.
The other (1 mth old) is getting quite a few hits each time they put an ad up. Guess for them it works. Of course, you need to have product!

[bossmanty]

How could this work for auto dealers thinking out side of the box?

My friend is looking for a niche with the web and his paper to entice Auto Dealers to place more display ads...

[buckworks]

If the space is free, by all means try it and see how it goes. Be sure the URL you're promoting is short and easy to type. Create a redirect URL if you need to, example yoursite.com/dogs going to a page about dogs with a longer URL. Also consider the need for tracking. It wouldn't need to be fancy. If the URL you created was unique to that ad, you'd just have to check your logs and see how many times it was accessed to get an idea of the response rates.

Anyone who saw your ad and was interested enough to look up your site would usually be a well-motivated prospect for whatever you were promoting. Even if the quantity of traffic you got from a classified ad seemed low, I expect the quality would be pretty good.

Let us know how it goes.

[uk_dokey]

We tried advertising our site in the local media. 1 particular paper had a circulation of over 1 million. The outcome was abysmal. We recorded no increase in hits for that day and tracked down all our sales to our usual online promotions i.e cpc Overture etc. At £250 a day to advertise it was a sharp learning curve for us. Now we concentrate purely on online advertising with far better results. At the end of the day when you advertise online it just takes 1 mouse click to reach us but with the paper it takes a lot more and most people just can't be bothered. This is just our findings but our site is auto related so I fear a similar response for you.

[brotherhood of LAN]

yep, i guess this is why everyone has a website :) its one thing for someone to read about your company, but interacting with the company online is another.

[minnapple]

Also tried the classified in major newspapers.
No added traffic.
Not many people sit by their computer with a newspaper.
Now if there were computers in johns, it would be a different story.
minnapple

[rcjordan]

>At £250 a day to advertise it was a sharp learning curve for us.

Yes, my one newspaper ad (well-placed, too) cost about the same for a 3 day run and generated 1 click. Yeow!

[fathom]

Personnal I find the offline to online "push" redundant.

Much sooner focus resources on the "online" crowd since half a billion are already there.

Newspapers are good for press releases though!

When your news, it's free as well and people interested check you out, probably more than a classified ad I reckon!

[Robert Charlton]

You can't click on a newspaper....

[fathom]

Ya... but I wouldn't try smacking a fly on the wall with a mouse!

[bossmanty]

FREE ad space placed in front of that many eyeballs has to have some value..... FREE - FREE - FREE....

I guess I'm in the minority because if I see or hear a simple url in Print, Billboard, Radio, etc. I normally follow up if it's something of interest to me....

[Travoli]

Print drives traffic in some very specific instances. Success is a mixture of branding and targeting correctly.

[fathom]

I wouldn't conclude Bossmanty that your in a minority. Just that the ad space needs to match the demographics of your market (or industry) to have value.

I would guess that discount items "priced for quick turn-around" may be quiet suited for the upsell, since many people look for deals in classifieds.