RefreshClassifieds

Google has officially launched their Print Adwords for Newspapers today.  The service has been in beta for just under a year with a limited selection of Newspapers and advertisers.   While the service is not directly available for Classifieds, advertisers can purchase display advertising in the classified section.  Here’s the Google description:

Classifieds
Classifieds are short notices usually for offered services, business listings, items for sale, or ‘wanted’ ads. Classified ads generally appear in ads-only sections, grouped with other ads with similar content. Typically text-based, classified ads can consist of as little as the product or service’s title and a phone number. Google Print Ads does not currently accept classified ads, FSIs, or circulars – only run of press (ROP) ads.

I think the most interesting line is “Google Print Ads does not currently accept classified ads”. A little foreshadowing I think…

The Trader Media Group in the UK is offering a service for classified advertisers to filter inbound calls from unsolicited services.  The service is available primarily to Autotrader.co.uk advertisers and filters out 220 known solicitors that typically canvas the Autotrader.co.uk listings.  The service is called Telesafe and has filter out 36,000 unsolicited calls so far.

The service works by replacing the advertisers phone number in the classified ad with a phone number that can be used to filter calls.    Before the call is actually connected its checked against a list of known numbers and automatically dropped if the call is coming from a known canvasing company.  The service is provided for free to all advertisers as an option.

I think this is a great example of extending the value of paid classified.   As more and more smaller classified sites pop-up this canvasing and solicitation issue will become a bigger problem.  AutoTrader.co.uk solves this problem as a value add for its advertisers.

Newspaper Classifieds have been battling with free classified sites for years and many believed the worst had pasted. The Newspaper Association of America is reporting that Classified revenues are down another 13.2%. Within Classifieds the decline breaks as follows:

• - 14.2% in Real Estate advertising
• - 14.3% in Recruitment advertising
• - 20.1% in Automotive advertising
• - 0.5% in Other Classified advertising

There was some speculation that the American Real Estate market was further impacting the Classified decline but it would appear that Automotive and Recruitment have also been had a big impact.

Online advertising ( not exclusive to Classifieds Advertising ) has increased by 22.3% but has not offset the decline from Classified Advertising.

The revenue is certainly showing that Newspapers need to be more innovating with how they generate online revenue if they’re going to remain a dominate media source. Craigslist and other free Classifieds are here to stay. To compete the solution might be to use to free Classifieds a traffic draw to get users to interact with other aspects of the website.

JobLoft has partnered with Nexopia to provide employment ads to the Nexopia.com social network. Nexopia bills themselves as Canada’s largest top socual community site. With the popularity of Facebook this might be the case anymore but the most interesting part of the strategy is the comment from the Jobloft blog:

“With the evolution of social community websites (MySpace, Friendster, Facebook, etc), we can now leverage the right demographic to fill Retail, Food Service and Hospitality positions faster”

I think this is a great example of a small startup being able to move faster than the competition. When I first saw the JobLoft demo at DemoCamp I was very impressed with how well they understood their target customer, retails advertisers, and their users. They brought together alot of fairly complex technology to create a very easy to use solution.

If JobLoft can continue to innovate and find its customers before the major media outls they will continue reap the rewards. I wouldn’t be surprised to see them continue to expand and take advantage of other social networks.

YP Corp announced that they have acquired OnCall Subscriber Management Inc based out Manila, Philippines. The deal gives YP Corp state of the art access to customer management and call center technology. Its an interest decision when most of the industry is moving towards outsourced call centers.

As more and more free online classified and directory competitors become popular the need for an industry leading call center will become important. The free listings can be used as a lead generation database for the call center to upsell into paid advertising. An effective call center will be in converting these customers and it might not be possible to get this level of service through and outsourced relationship. It will be interesting to see how YP Corp uses this new resource.

Most websites today depend on search engine traffic and monitoring your search engine strategy can be a complicated process. For classified sites it can be even more difficult since they cover a wide variety of merchandise and search keywords. There are 5 basic steps you can take to ensure you’re aware of your search engine status:

1. Focus your effort

Depending on your geographic region its also important to understand the dominate search site. For example Google in Canada has nearly 60% of all search engine traffic so your focus for a Canadian Classified site should be on Google. You can use your sites traffic logs as an indicator but a better strategy would be to find a broader outlook that covers many web sites in your region.

2. Search for Items

One easy way to measure your Classified site is to search for items typically found in your ads. This will give you an accurate measure of how the search site is seeing your ad content. If you’re site doesn’t rank highly on the search results, you have work to do. One common mistake is to search for your company name and assuming everything is good with your strategy. This not an accurate test as most companies will rank high for the name but this won’t help you for users that don’t your company.

3. Links are your friends

A good way to think of links as a vote for your site. The most votes you have the higher your regard with most search sites. You can monitor the number of links your have with most major search engines.

4. Indexed Pages

Content is king with search sites and one of the easy ways to measure your search success is the number of pages captured or indexed by the search site. You can measure pages indexed against the number of Classified ads or the number of pages your site contains. When doing this comparison besure to include dynamically generator pages like search result pages.

5. Invite the spiders

Classified sites are in a continual change as new ads are added and removed. It you to be that you had to wait for the search spiders to visit your site, Today most search sites provide the ability to submit an XML sitemap showing all the webpages you want the spiders to visit. The XML sitemap can also contain the priority of pages that you want the spiders to visit. The Google sitemap interface also provides a number of tools to monitor your site, see error messages from the spiders and how often they are visiting your site.

Downunder in Australia, Google and the Trading Post are being accused of deceptive advertising over sponsored search listings involving 2 automotive dealer names. In would appear that Trading Post purchased ads using competitive automotive dealer names. When consumers clicked on the ads then redirected users to the Trading Post where a variety of automotive classified ads could be found. Most of the action has focused on Google but it would appear that Trading Post is equality as culpable.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission wants Google to provide better distinction between paid advertising and organic search. This would set an interesting president for Google which has been relatively free to dictate how their run their paid search advertising programs.

In Canada they seem to allow anyone to purchase ads for competitive keywords, including Trademarks but the actual ad creative cannot contain any Trademarks that you don’t own. Even then the system is often abused and Google is slow to resolve abuse from smaller companies use Trademarks in their advertising.

Yesterday AT&T launched a new directory assistance service called AT&T 1-800-YellowPages. Consumers looking for a particular product can call the directory service and get a business number or be connected directly if the listen to a audio ads. The ads 5-10s long and advertise other businesses to the consumer. Its not clear if the audio ads are directly competitive with the heading that the consumer is calling about.

The Yellowpages Group in Canada runs as similar service called YELO, at 310-YELO but they provide the service exclusively to Yellowpages advertisers so the service is funded as part of the business’s advertising purchase.   There are no audio ads or delay except for the businesses that the consumer is trying to connect with.

Looking at the AT&T approach I can see a few problems with competitor conflict and it seems to decrease the value to the AT&T Yellowpages advertiser. Especially consumer’s have a harder time finding them through the directory assistance or have to wait through numerous audio ads.

The AT&T product strategy reminds me of the double-dip situation you see in many Classified sites where the consumer is charged to see the ads and the advertiser is charged to advertise. These double-dip situations are very difficult to pull off with low cost of the internet and level of competitive classified solutions. Eventually the advertiser and consumer will find a more available method to connect.

The Denver Post is reporting that their local TV station KUSA-Channel 9 has started looking at classified advertising.  So far their only initiative seems to be to pull some ads onto their own site through a local search. You can see some of the results here:

http://search.9news.com/sp?aff=102&keywords=classifieds

Its not clear the value that this provides to the KUSA channel except to become more of a destination for users. They don’t currently have a method to advertise directly with them or monetize the adverising thats come through from competing local media. It might let them test the market and provide another reason for users to visit their website. As it becomes easier and easier to develop an online classified experience I think we’ll see more of these odd mash-ups.

On June 1st Quebecor Media launched its ClassifiedExtra.ca site, reported “Canada’s Biggest and power Classified Network”. Around Toronto you can see ClassifiedExtra.ca being promoted on the 24 hrs street boxes and in the back of the 24 hours newspaper. It would appear that Quebecor forgot to register ClassifiedsExtra.ca ( pural ) though and it redirects to WeHire.ca a site not run by Quebecor Media. A good lesson in picking a domain and registering the not just the domain but different variations.

And yes, we have registered RefreshClassified.com too.