No more IMG tag on Craigslist

[Brian Pasch]

Yago, do you expect to see a significant decrease in clicks back to dealership websites as a result of this change?

 

[yagoparamo]

Yago, do you expect to see a significant decrease in clicks back to dealership websites as a result of this change?

Mr. Pash good to see you here. We need you to join more often.

The click backs (referral traffic to the dealer's website) are pretty much gone for now. Some of the ads that you still see with banners/links/etc are being re-rewed from the CL back end, they are not new. That will only last for so long.

The IMG tag is not the only change at this time, CraigsList is also deleting a lot of the ads being posted at random but with preference they delete those with external links. The ads that "stick" need to be pretty basic. That may change within the next 30 days. It has been common in the past that when they add a new change to their system they have pretty high filters on what they let in the servers.

As far as phone calls and emails we have seen an increase in some cases. We see less than 50% of the ads being posted (or at least sticking) compared to before the change however the site has the same number of traffic, the result is that the dealers left with ads get to show their cars more often. It is not about how many ads you have but how many compared to the total volume in that area.

A lot of the current "flagging" seems to be random and time based (they will delete or "filter" ads between 2pm and 5pm then change) so they are not targeting something specific. The change may be a push for people to upload to their system so they can control better ad quality and also promote their new "grid view". Notice that of you use the grid view once your computer gets a cookie that sets CraigsList to grid view next time you come back. That just happened with this new change.

 

[jscole86]

Yago, If you are manually posting vehicles on craigslist, how many would you recommend doing per day? Are there times of the day or different days that you would recommend to avoid posting? Any other insights would be valuable. Thanks!

 

[yagoparamo]

Yago, If you are manually posting vehicles on craigslist, how many would you recommend doing per day? Are there times of the day or different days that you would recommend to avoid posting? Any other insights would be valuable. Thanks!

I wish I could answer that...

We have always posted manually, what we automated was the template creation. We worked on having a better lead response than having volume of the same ad posted by a machine. I mention this so you see that we have quite a few people posting manually, some very little--maybe just one dealer--some may handle 3-4 dealers. But the key is that we had a lot of good people with experience on manually customizing ads and with great flexibility posting them.

So here is my response...

A lot of the deletions have been random. The times, what ads, areas, etc have changed form day to day. Morning seems to be easier than afternoon however at the end of the day we see 25,000 total ads in the Seattle area and suddenly they go gown to 16,000. A month ago you would see 40,000 by the end of the day.

Whether you post a lot or a few made no difference but a few tips: keep the postings as basic as possible. Change your IP and even your ISP.

 

[Matthew Danskin]

I always used the coded images from my carsforsale.com site and attached a photo of myself in front of the dealership so it would show up as having a photo.

 

[jscole86]

We have always posted manually, what we automated was the template creation.

So is it still possible to use the the Craigslist templates that can be manually generated from the dealer.com inventory back end tool? They generate an html template to paste into CL... Can I use them as they are by default or should take out all the external links and embedded images from the code that is generated? Or even more so, would you recommend keeping it plain by just using plain text (no html) and uploading several images?

 

[yagoparamo]

CL is right now blocking most of the HTML. Simple images with text works best.

 

[SteveD]

Wonder if we'll at least be able to put a live link back to the VDP?

 

[Billfred]

Wonder if we'll at least be able to put a live link back to the VDP?

So far, that appears to be unimpeded. (knock on wood)

 

[yagoparamo]

Wonder if we'll at least be able to put a live link back to the VDP?

we have linked so far to a landing page JUST so we can rotate the URL and not get the same key words repeated all the time (your dealer name URL).


Dodge with video on Landing page


Campbell with video


LJ with video


Klein as Everett Finance with video