Local.com Partners With Oodle for Local Classifieds

Local.com continues to expand into related local search verticals announcing a partnership with Oodle.com. Strategically, the addition of classified verticals to local search platforms has driven incremental consumer usage as users navigate across the two offerings.

According to Heath Clarke, CEO of Local.com: “Oodle has good breadth and depth of listings across a wide number of categories. They had the most comprehensive listing database we had seen at the time.” Indeed, Oodle claims to have the largest set of classified listings. The company claims 15,000 million listings from more than 60,000 individual sites.

Many local sites, including Local.com, spend significant marketing dollars to attract consumers to their local listings. The trick here is to retain direct domain users and upsell business customers to classified listings and other local-related products. Local.com has previously announced that the company achieved a net positive return on advertising spend. This means the company is not spending more on marketing than it is generating in revenues.

In terms of growing usage, Clarke went on to say that “visitors on the Local.com classifieds section have an average of 4.5-5.0 page views per visitor.” In December, roughly 1 percent, or 80,000, visitors went from the Local.com domain to the classified section. Deeper and more robust integrations are planned that should boost that number in the coming months.

Clarke notes that early indications suggest a positive trend. “In just one month, we have Local.com users posting 3,200 new classified ads through the co-brand. That means that nearly 5 percent of users are posting classifieds. We think this is a pretty exciting number for our first month.”