How effective is it to feature a Classified Ad in the Right Column?

After taking over the Advertising work for the Cohousing Website in Jan-08, I looked very carefully at the traffic patterns. What did I find?

That a great many of our Classified Ads were hardly ever read... this isn't right I thought - people that take out Classified Ads must receive their money's worth. So, what did I do?

I started playing around with the website's Right Column - which appears on most of the pages throughout the Cohousing Website. I created the idea of "Featured Classified Ads" and put links to specific Classified Ads there.

I then started tracking the number of "reads" that a variety of different Classified Ads received, featuring it for different periods, and taking a snapshot of the number of page views.
The impact of appearing in that column turned out to be absolutely HUGE - in some cases, a hundred or more views in a few days vs. just a few reads a day when the Classifed Ad only appeared in the Marketplace Ghetto - with no featured position.

I also analysed the overall traffic across time for the Right Column. My analysis lead me to believe that it needed to change across time to remain interesting to repeat visitors.

So, I began doing change the content on occassion. Now, people who visit the site will often find new stuff there - to keep it more interesting.

After thinking about this more, I worked with our webmaster, Catya (who is also co-hosting the Technology Room) to create a new type of Advertising Placement. By the way, as the Coho/US Exec Dir, I'm also pretty focused on growing the organization's income. This led to new types of add-one Classified Advertising EXTRA - so now, for extra money, people who want their Classified Ads can buy placement of their Ad Headline in the right column within the different sections of this website, these are:

• Cohousing Directory
• Cohousing magazine
• About Cohousing
• Marketplace

It is also possible to place an Ad in all four sections and even add placement in the homepage. Since these placements have such a huge impact on the traffic that any given Classified Ad will receiv, we are putting a fairly high price on them. This will also have the effect of driving some change in that section - for example, if somebody wants to sell their cohousing home, they will only list it there until the home is sold - and if they are savvy about the cost of having a home on the market, then they will realize that the ROI (Return On Investment) for the increased attention is very high.

More to come... Craig