Advice on Craigslist ad posting services

[AutoArchitech]

Did sales go up? Were most of the calls asking for more info? That is interesting. I do know most of the dealers see it more as advertising since the page views can be tremendous compared to other sources. The Dealer I used above had an average of 68 cars on CL last month and had 15,737 people click on a photo to one of the landing pages.

Cargigi is a HNI partner, that is where the inventory feed comes through

 

[joe.pistell]

plus, I havent done a study, but my guts telling me that all the little bas*ards that black flag us don't feel so threatened with an old school ad.

 

[eag818]

plus, I havent done a study, but my guts telling me that all the little bas*ards that black flag us don't feel so threatened with an old school ad.

People are Black Flagging you?

RISE ABOVE! RISE ABOVE!

I'm glad this thread was created. We've been on the HUNT for a great CL posting tool where we can post multiple ads without being ghosted/flagged and so forth.

We've used eBizAutos platform when we were with them, worked great.

We signed up with HomeNet's IOL platform through a 3rd party provider, great analytics tool, but it turned out they were posting only 3-6 cars a day.

One of our old friends who owns DealerFront (for smaller dealerships) came out with a CL posting tool called TheAutoLoader (theautoloader.net). It's manual, but hey, we post ALL 85 of our used cars every day. Giveortake 30-40% of our web traffic comes from Craigslist. $150 a month, and we can also post to Backpage. It's manual posting, I know. It takes a good couple of hours to get the inventory live, but its worth it if you want to post all at once.

To also post several at once every day, we also have to erase content in the ad (sellers notes, vehicle features, etc) so CL wont freak and say SIMILAR POSTING OMG.

We've seen a lot of our CL ads rank in Google as well, so we keyphrase our last lines in our seller's notes for that purpose.

 

[joe.pistell]

... The Dealer I used above had an average of 68 cars on CL last month and had 15,737 people click on a photo to one of the landing pages...

AA,

Are your dealer(s) having problems with CL black flags pulling down ads?

 

[AutoArchitech]

One of our old friends who owns DealerFront (for smaller dealerships) came out with a CL posting tool called TheAutoLoader (theautoloader.net). It's manual, but hey, we post ALL 85 of our used cars every day. Giveortake 30-40% of our web traffic comes from Craigslist. $150 a month, and we can also post to Backpage. It's manual posting, I know. It takes a good couple of hours to get the inventory live, but its worth it if you want to post all at once.

HomeNet has the same manual tool (for less than the $150) also. I don't know what market you are in but around here posting all 85 each day will get you blacklisted from CL very quickly. People will flag them if they keep seeing you post that many. I have a few stores on that too and when they are set up we recommend under 15 a day.

 

[AutoArchitech]

AA,

Are your dealer(s) having problems with CL black flags pulling down ads?

Not that I see. I do get a daily report of what is listed and if any are flagged. I do see 1 or 2 a month that get flagged from all of the stores combined, I figured that is probably someone that just does not like that dealer, at that time.

My opinion on the CL, Kajiji, and Backpage postings is it is more of a cheap way to advertise and get your name out than getting great leads...

I would think any Dealer should at least try Craigs List and see what happens. I have most of them start off doing it with templates and see if there are results. If there are results and it gets to be time consuming we flip it to the automated setup.

Personally I think Ebay is a waste of time and money, but that should be its own thread...

 

[Gerald]

Late last year I signed up the largest eBay dealer in the world with a program which automatically manages your vehicles, monitoring for ghosting, flagging and killed posts. The posts all have 3-4 links into your website for great SEO benefit, and pushes 10% of your inventory every day. The reporting is amazing and in depth. One dealer with an average 70-80 cars was getting 700-1100 ad clicks/month and sells a bunch.

Let me know if you're interested and I'll get you the contact info.

Thanks.

 

[AutoArchitech]

700-100 ad clicks does not seem like a bunch from the reports I see. Wonder why?

 

[joe.pistell]

Not that I see. I do get a daily report of what is listed and if any are flagged. I do see 1 or 2 a month that get flagged from all of the stores combined, I figured that is probably someone that just does not like that dealer, at that time.

My opinion on the CL, Kajiji, and Backpage postings is it is more of a cheap way to advertise and get your name out than getting great leads...

I would think any Dealer should at least try Craigs List and see what happens. I have most of them start off doing it with templates and see if there are results. If there are results and it gets to be time consuming we flip it to the automated setup.

Personally I think Ebay is a waste of time and money, but that should be its own thread...

I have been battling black flags for ever. We get as bad as 50% black flags, but, its NEVER consistent. I have tweaked and optimized with no repeatable outcome. I've then detuned and detuned them some more. I've scaled it all the way back to a manual process with only the bare basics. Here is my $0.02 on CL black flagging based on my best guess.

CL has automation in place to police blatant spamming. Because Black Flags that I experience are so random AND because CL is filled with itty bitty sellers that consider CL "their" market, I blame the majority of black flags on whiney 2bit competitor(s) trying to make my life miserable.

I have a pal that owns a cell phone store with the exact same problem. Random and frequent black flagging.

 

[AutoArchitech]

because CL is filled with itty bitty sellers that consider CL "their" market, I blame the majority of black flags on whiney 2bit competitor(s) trying to make my life miserable.
.

I agree that is most of it. There are some people that will go through and flag every ad from a Dealer because they think the big bad dealer does not "belong" there. They do have a Dealer section, pretty obvious they don't care too much...