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Hammer Corp, Better Craigslist SEO?

flosho

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Dec 20, 2010
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Jason
Anyone have experience with Hammer Corp and their CL posting services? I've been told one of the developers at Hammer Corp has knowledge of the algorithm that CL uses when sorting searches. For example someone searches for Dodge Ram and some posts from a week ago show up ahead of a post from that day.

We do very well with craigslist already but if we can improve how our ads show up on the SRP that would be even better. I'm skeptical that Hammer Corp has the magic sauce...
 
I've been told one of the developers at Hammer Corp has knowledge of the algorithm that CL uses when sorting searches.

I find any claims like this to be dubious, at best. Moreover, if it actually worked, it would surely violate Craigslist's Terms of Service. Not sure gaming CL is a smart move.

That said, the "algorithm" seems pretty straightforward to me. I buy and sell dozens of items (including vehicles) on Craigslist every year. To get my post to show up at the top, I simply refresh my ad. A paying dealer cannot do that, but posting on the right days (Thursday evening, Friday and Saturday mornings) and occasionally reposting (for another $5) those vehicles that are priced right, seem to drive the results up for my clients using CL.

when you say well, how many do you list/sell on CL?

Will, I have a few clients who sell more on CL than ATC/Cars combined... It's a market thing, in some cases; but if done right, dealers can do quite well on CL. Here are a few of the CL best practices I share with my clients:
  1. If you're in a large Metro Area, put your city name in the title of the listing and not your phone number: 2014 Acura RDX Sport (Santa Rosa) – This eliminates calls from consumers who have no intention of driving across the entire region to see your vehicle.
  2. Provide price in the title and body of every ad (improves the call quality) – If you’re listing at close to the market price, you will receive high quality calls from buyers ready to buy.
  3. Allow consumers to call or text only; never encourage emails from Craigslist. These are low funnel buyers and an email creates too much back and forth. With a call or a text, you can tell the consumer that you have “… two test drives open on that vehicle this afternoon. I’ve got a …”
  4. Emulate consumer ads – Don’t get too flashy with the ads (as most dealers do), but definitely identify yourself as the dealership. (For example, stop using stars and cheesy verbiage like this: ★JUST REDUCED - Call 4 NEW PRICE★)
  5. If you're not priced to market, don't waste your time on Craigslist. CL shoppers are LOW FUNNEL BUYERS, and a vehicle priced right will sell quickly. (The one caveat to this is if you are big with Sub Prime Customers and plan to use CL to drive more Sub Prime Volume. In that case, leave the price off many of your vehicles and focus on the easy financing aspect in these ads.)
 
Will, I have a few clients who sell more on CL than ATC/Cars combined... It's a market thing, in some cases; but if done right, dealers can do quite well on CL. Here are a few of the CL best practices I share with my clients:
  1. If you're in a large Metro Area, put your city name in the title of the listing and not your phone number: 2014 Acura RDX Sport (Santa Rosa) – This eliminates calls from consumers who have no intention of driving across the entire region to see your vehicle.
  2. Provide price in the title and body of every ad (improves the call quality) – If you’re listing at close to the market price, you will receive high quality calls from buyers ready to buy.
  3. Allow consumers to call or text only; never encourage emails from Craigslist. These are low funnel buyers and an email creates too much back and forth. With a call or a text, you can tell the consumer that you have “… two test drives open on that vehicle this afternoon. I’ve got a …”
  4. Emulate consumer ads – Don’t get too flashy with the ads (as most dealers do), but definitely identify yourself as the dealership. (For example, stop using stars and cheesy verbiage like this: ★JUST REDUCED - Call 4 NEW PRICE★)
  5. If you're not priced to market, don't waste your time on Craigslist. CL shoppers are LOW FUNNEL BUYERS, and a vehicle priced right will sell quickly. (The one caveat to this is if you are big with Sub Prime Customers and plan to use CL to drive more Sub Prime Volume. In that case, leave the price off many of your vehicles and focus on the easy financing aspect in these ads.)

Great input, @Stauning! Thank you for that!
 
I know nothing about them, I do know the following groups:
I've used these for nearly a hundred dealer locations / feeds for many, many thousands of used vehicles ads on CL and measured lead conversions and sales through CRM path analyses.

https://www.hammer-corp.com
They don't look bad, but make sure it's native, proprietary software because a lot of group white label and it could be one of the two aforementioned. I know, as I plan on partnering with LotVantage in the future for a project of my own (market adoption segment), in order to leverage their feed to CL technology via API.

CL now charges per vehicle listing, so there is no longer a ton of SPAM, etc. I'm not really sure what you had meant by SEO in this thread's title though. These are paid ads on CL. This really nothing to do with organic optimization.
 
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Thanks Alexander for mentioning Dice Services, if any one is interested, we will answer any questions you have and even give you an estimate of how many leads can we get for you. Compare with your current solution, NO LOSS TO YOU, just more info to help you to make your choice.

The statement "knowledge of the algorithm that CL uses when sorting searches", CL is not giving there algorithm to anyone the best you can do is try and see what works best, plus they are making content changes to it to improve the results. But there are standard guidelines that you can follow to get great results.

So if you looking for some improvement check us out.

Have a great day!
 
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Thanks Alexander for mentioning Dice Services, if any one is interested, we will answer any questions you have and even give you an estimate of how many leads can we get for you. Compare with your current solution, NO LOSS TO YOU, just more info to help you to make your choice.

The statement "knowledge of the algorithm that CL uses when sorting searches", CL is not giving there algorithm to anyone the best you can do is try and see what works best, plus they are making content changes to it to improve the results. But there are standard guidelines that you can follow to get great results.

So if you looking for some improvement check us out.

Have a great day!
I had responded Drey. I do know Andrey.
 
Thanks Alexander for mentioning Dice Services, if any one is interested, we will answer any questions you have and even give you an estimate of how many leads can we get for you. Compare with your current solution, NO LOSS TO YOU, just more info to help you to make your choice.

The statement "knowledge of the algorithm that CL uses when sorting searches", CL is not giving there algorithm to anyone the best you can do is try and see what works best, plus they are making content changes to it to improve the results. But there are standard guidelines that you can follow to get great results.

So if you looking for some improvement check us out.

Have a great day!
No problem!
 
Let me disclaim that we own a company that provides Craigslist posting services exclusively for the automotive industry (car dealers): autoclassifiedsolutions

I don't post this because of the hundred dollars you may pay us to use our software... but I have been playing with Craigslist since the early 2000's and still feel pretty strong about it because of its disruption on the automotive 3rd party classified websites. Craigslist changed the way a lot of people looked at using alternative online classified sources to the, until then, very well entrenched classified solutions available.

I'll try to make my post useful by "de-mystifying" some of the things that people are writing.

1) There is no proprietary API , or better API, or for that part any software better than the other. Craigslist has the same API for everyone. Everyone can send and receive the same data to Craigslist (and it is pretty limited).

2) "Their ads look really good", "They have great templates", etc. No, they don't. Craigslist allows, pretty much, just text. No images, no colors, no logos, no links, no code. You can add a few text icons (like alt+characters) to bring a little bit of color in some computers. So whatever "template" you think you like, can be copied in .1 seconds.

3) "They figured out Craigslist "algorithm". The answer is no, but there are some tricks. Craigslist will default its SERP to "relevant" and it seems to do that by a few things like the completeness of the add (amount of text), the key words, the number of times a word appears (prius prius prius prius), and by making some of those words in bold. So that is why most good templates have a bunch of key words stuffed at the bottom.

4) Craigslist works depending on: Your market (do a lot of people use Craigslist). Thats pretty much it. If you go to Craigslist in your market and there are a lot of people in other/any areas of the site posting ads, it will work. If there are no people using it, it will not work. If you are far from the posting area, usually it doesn't work unless your cars are ridiculously priced lower or you have very unique cars (like 80 lifted trucks, or 70 redone Jeeps, or 40 BMW M3s of every color, etc).

5) What cars work on Craigslist? Years ago, when we were able to measure things on Craigslist (before the change!), we loaded a pixel at the end of the ads so we knew how many times the ad got loaded all the way. Out of 500+ accounts that we had at that time the Porsche dealers got the most traffic. That doesn't mean they sold the most cars, people could be "just looking" at Porsches because they look good. Obviously even nowadays dealers with "cheaper" cars get more calls, things kinda work like that. Some of the dealers that got the most traffic back then were also Cadillac dealers.

6) About some claims that Craigslist works better than autotrader, Cars.com, etc. For every 1000 dealers at a round table there are 1000 stories with 1000 deviations each. My take is that you be careful before you delete an advertising source, and that nowadays since customers call/email less but visit more at the end of the buying process, be very careful when measuring a new one. Craigslist is cheap; a dealer with 100 cars is all in for less than $800/month.

7) For posting frequency, how often I post my cars, let me say that I thought that the days when dealers spent lost of resources by posting the entire inventory every day would be over since the new rules. But surprisingly to me I have seen in some markets dealers with aggressive posting budgets doing very well. So in some very competitive markets, spending the money to control the posting frequency has allowed some people to corner an area. I'll disclaim that we don't make more or less money by how much you spend, we sell you a software that you use, so no intent to sell you here on spending more money.

So what should I look for to do well ion Craigslist?

Look at the areas available for you to post.
Start posting once a month, its cheap there is no contract.
Use a tool with flexibility of postings:

a) Prioritize my cheaper cars
b) Prioritize postings in certain days
c) Prioritize certain areas

That is the key for the tool, how flexible are you to post means that you can play with and when the market responds to your postings.

Good Luck!
 
Yago nailed it, but I'll add my $0.02 to this specious idea that some vendors have "inside knowledge". When I owned AutoRevo, we built a CL posting tool and as someone who contributed quite a bit of the source code to this tool, I know about as well as anyone else the ins and outs of CL.

There is no secret sauce; there is no proprietary API that only some vendors have access to. Craigslist hates all vendors equally. Any vendor that will lie to you like that isn't a vendor you should do business with.

I'm not involved with any company that offers CL posting tools any more, but from what I see it's largely a commodity service. Choose a provider that offers the best management tools; gives you the most insights into ROI, etc. Don't choose one based on their "inside knowledge" of CL.