“The increment in paid campaigns was largely from smaller towns and cities, what we called remote cities, so as a result there’s no reduction in price, however, the ticket size in smaller cities, the remote cities are about 40% that of the main cities,” Justdial’s Chief Financial Officer Ramkumar Krishnamachari said while answering an analyst about why despite a healthy growth in paid campaigns the pricing per campaign had taken a beating, during the company’s earnings call.
It’s worth noting that at present 83% of Justdial’s overall revenue is coming from these main cities, and the remote cities contribute the remaining 17%.
At the end of the quarter ended March 31, 2017 (Q4 FY17), Justdial was conducting 435,360 paid campaigns for advertisers as compared to 368,800 campaigns at the end of Q4 FY16, representing a growth of 18%. Justdial made Rs 4173 per paid campaign in Q4 FY17, down from Rs 4870 per paid campaign in the same quarter last year. Campaigns are essentially paid featured listings/recommendations on Justdial search.
Resumption of ad campaign: After two years of zero advertising, Justdial started a new ad campaign in Q4 FY17. They spent a total of Rs 11 crores on advertising, of which about Rs 7-7.5 crore was attributed to ad spends. Talking about how the ad campaign has impact traffic, Krishnamachari said: “What we’ve seen is that for Q4 the traffic growth year-on-year has grown about 20%. And as far as one of the things that we closely track also is that we have seen positive correlation in the improvement in the number of app downloads. There’s almost a 25-30% growth in number of app downloads post the advertising campaign.”
Mobile dominates traffic: Justdial recorded 87 million total unique visitors in Q4 FY17. Mobile accounted for 60% of the traffic, followed by web with a share of 30%, and finally voice contributed 10% of the overall traffic. Among the traffic generated by mobile, 10% came from the app.
On a year-on-year (YoY) basis, overall traffic has grown about 22% and mobile traffic has grown about 42%, while mobile app traffic has almost doubled.
Around 60% of the traffic is from search engines and about 20% is paid traffic, while the remaining 20% is direct traffic.
JD Lite launch: Justdial launched a lighter version of its app called JD Lite, with a download size of 1MB. Justdial founder VSS Mani said that “there’s is going to be a focused marketing on that (JD Lite) and there we see a lot more users actually downloading the app because it’s just a 1MB app and it pretty much has almost all the apps put together in one place. And, in fact, downloads if I compare between last year same quarter versus this year there is 46% growth in the app downloads in just Android alone and iPhone is about 23-24%.”
The total app download at the end of Q4 FY17 stood at 13.25 million.
Movie ticketing: In FY17, Justdial paid about Rs 13 crore (Rs 2 crore in Q1, Rs 5 crore in Q2, and Rs 6 crore in Q3) to access its movie ticketing partner’s inventory of seats and enable users to book tickets on Justdial.
Competition from Google: Mani considers Google’s aggressive promotion of local search good for Justdial, because the category improves. “I strongly feel local search is all about giving people more accurate information, giving them options, giving them the ability to compare reviews and ratings, like we show your friend’s ratings for the searches that you’ve done, and then there’s all lot of things that go along with it. It’s nice to have competition like Google, but we are pretty confident with our product, we will be able to differentiate and the Justdial experience will be superior to what you would get on Google,” he added.
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