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Attracting more 'quality' traffic to our site?

by aaronrb
4 replies
We are currently running a free classifieds site. It's essentially a craigslist for an island in the Caribbean. We've advertised with facebook, adwords, so we've been successful with free ads and our fanpage has over 15K fans.

But our main goal now is attracting users to post upgraded ads. The process is the same as free ads: 1) Click on 'Post Free Ad' button, 2) Select your area, 3) Enter item details. The difference is that the item details page has a section that lets you select what upgrade you want. If that's empty, then it's free. Otherwise, you get the payment page. Upgrades range from adding a border in the results to displaying your ad in the homepage.

My question is: What types of marketing/promotion strategies can we use to motivate users to upgrade their ad? We've tried everything, but people don't seem to take to ad upgrades. We even had a promotion where we would give away tickets to the Britney Spears concert, but nothing.

Most people in this country aren't used to ecommerce sites... could it be that users aren't used to online payment? Or maybe they don't see the purpose of upgrading their ad?

We've even posted a webpage showing how to create the upgraded ad.

Any help would be appreciated.
#attracting #quality #site #traffic
  • Profile picture of the author Toasted75
    Without knowing anything about your business, it's hard to give any specific advice, but you've identified two very likely causes in a) they don't see a need to upgrade and b) possibly aren't used to online payments.

    If it's a case to not being used to online payments, the good news is that once someone has done it once, they are much more likely to do it again - so getting them over that first hump is a critical part of building repeat business. One option you could look at is to do some analysis of who is placing ads with you - figure out who the top 20 people are that place the most free ads but don't purchase an upgrade and offer them a special deal where they get to upgrade an ad for $1 - maybe let them upgrade several adds over a couple of weeks in the hope that they will 'get over' any problem they have and see a value in what an upgraded ad brings them.

    The other thing to consider is does upgrading an ad *really* give them any benefits over a free ad? if the pricing structure was figured out some time ago and your metrics have changed since then (or if you've never had people upgrading ads), it may be time to look at if you're either charging too much, or not providing enough benefits.
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  • Profile picture of the author webapex
    Featured ads are more valuable when an ad will otherwise get lost in a sea of ads. If you still have relatively light ad volumes it may just be too early to sell such upgrades, some successful sites have made it a point to remain free (funded by investor funds) until they became a leader, Facebook and Youtube being examples.

    Some new forum and advertising sites find a need to "seed" the sites with content and activity, some scrape data from established sites to fatten site content, or pay people to participate in the site.

    I can just guess that having plenty of example featured ads displayed will help, perhaps you can randomly give away upgrades as well as mixing in upgrade promotional messages in standard upgraded ad format.
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    • Profile picture of the author curly sue
      carribean island have very small populations. 15,000 people on your facebook page must be the whole island. seems your traffic is limited by location.
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  • Profile picture of the author sscot
    Get some positive testimonials form paid users, publish them on website and encourage free users.
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