Craigslist ads? picture vs text...which do you think pulls more responses

Image ads usually perform better for me, or at least text with an image in the ad. However, you should always test. For instance, a well written ad may work better than some images, especially if they are lower quality images.

Also, the title of the ad can make a huge difference. If viewers never click on the title then, obviously, they never see the rest of the ad.

Are you using anything to track traffic and conversions? This is a must.

Another thing you have to worry about with Craigslist is ghosting and flagging. In other words, don't post too many ads at once on the same account, each ad needs to be unique, ads shouldn't look spammy or be in the wrong section, etc.

Is that so?

Why on earth are you using Craigslist then?

Diversifiedpublishing,

Images (when used appropriately) are generally far more powerful than text when advertising on craigslist. This is especially true for you selling a visual intensive service. People will undoubtedly contact you for samples so providing those in an ad would save some conversion steps for you.

Here is a good writeup on using images in advertising,

Using advertising images in class by Ben Goldstein

Best,

Shawn

I would assume an attractive banner ad with an enticing headline would pull in more views but I could be wrong. One thing to remember is people's attention spans is much shorter nowadays, especially online.

Re: Craigslist ads? picture vs text...which do you think pulls more responses

There's a powerful method (beyond A/B split testing) for finding what really works best, without guesswork: Multivariate testing.

Here's one way to do it:

* Open a text or word processor file. In it, brainstorm 3, 7, 11, or 15 (craigslist) ad elements you want to test.

* Give each element a name (picture, headline, call to action, etc.)

* Create two versions of each element (picture 1, picture 2, headline 1, headline 2, call to action 1, call to action 2, etc.)

The more drastically different they are from each other, the better. The goal is to find elements that perform so much better than others that statistical significance is not as important.

* Go to AdComparator - Multivariable Advertisement Analysis using the Taguchi Method, select the number of elements (factors) for the test. Enter the names of each, and use the tool to create the various test ad "recipes".

* Take the recipes provided by the tool and manually create the various test ads. Key each ad with a unique tracking code, so you can track response separately. I like to use Google Analytics to uniquely identify and track each ad.

* Run the test for a while and then when you have enough responses, enter the results into the tool at AdComparator.com to find the winning elements.

There's more to it but that's the gist of it.

~ Marty Foley