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Craigslist can work if done correctly

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#11
Flosho, I have never heard of only 3 postings a day being the most you can post on craigslist. Like I said I have been doing this particular campaign for 2 years now. I post around 9 - 15 ads a day, and I rotate them daily. I am NOT posting new ads, simply deleting and reposting the current ads. We use a phone verified account, so again I have never ran into any problems.
The current ads that are in the campaign were built slowely. Meaning I would post a few ads one day, post some more the next day. Untill there are 50+ ads running, then every day login, delete ad, repost ad.
I hope I am clearing up some confusion for you.
Honestly marketing on craigslist is the only marketing done for this dealership and they always ask potential buyers, "How did you find us?" Over 98% of the people say craigslist.
I personally know back in the day this dealership marketed with auto shopper every week, They spent big money. However after craigslist came along they dropped auto shopper and have stuck with craigslist 100% and never had had any problems. Just sales.
 
#13
Just wanted to share some stats from dealers that they recently shared with me - Dec stats. Sharing what the dealers shared with me. Based on what I see below, Craigslist (more importantly my service <smile>) works really well if done correctly. Free or costing more - which site do you thinks works better?

Dealer #1 - Major Metro Market Domestic OEM - Average vehicle price $19,543 - All listing sites use SAME inventory feed with pricing, photos, etc.

Craigslist - 39863 VDP's, 87 Phone Calls, 42 Leads, 113 sent to dealer site
ATC - 6474 VDP's, 51 Phone Calls, 13 Leads, 213 sent to dealer site (FYI, this dealer is on the "partner" program)
Cars - 14192 VDP's, 20 Phone Calls, 16 Leads, 57 sent to dealer site

Dealer #2 - Major Metro Market Luxury Domestic OEM - Average vehicle price $22,853 - All listing sites use SAME inventory feed with pricing, photos, etc.

Craigslist - 81 phone calls
ATC - 45 phone calls
Cars - 33 phone call



Open to any questions or comments.
 
#15
Drew, for those dealerships, what is their average daily inventory count?
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Dealer #1 - 92 vehicles
Dealer #2 - 79 vehicles

Also, what does VDP stand for? I have an idea but I'm no 100%.
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VDP = stand for "Vehicle Details Page". It is pretty much an industry standard term used to say how many people click/see that vehicles details. It goes along with SRP = Search Results Page, which Cars and ATC use to show how many times your vehicles appear in a search. We can't track this with Craigslist due to the current site design/layout.
 
#16
DrewAment said:
Just wanted to share some stats from dealers that they recently shared with me - Dec stats. Sharing what the dealers shared with me. Based on what I see below, Craigslist (more importantly my service <smile>) works really well if done correctly. Free or costing more - which site do you thinks works better?

Dealer #1 - Major Metro Market Domestic OEM - Average vehicle price $19,543 - All listing sites use SAME inventory feed with pricing, photos, etc.

Craigslist - 39863 VDP's, 87 Phone Calls, 42 Leads, 113 sent to dealer site
ATC - 6474 VDP's, 51 Phone Calls, 13 Leads, 213 sent to dealer site (FYI, this dealer is on the "partner" program)
Cars - 14192 VDP's, 20 Phone Calls, 16 Leads, 57 sent to dealer site

Dealer #2 - Major Metro Market Luxury Domestic OEM - Average vehicle price $22,853 - All listing sites use SAME inventory feed with pricing, photos, etc.

Craigslist - 81 phone calls
ATC - 45 phone calls
Cars - 33 phone call



Open to any questions or comments.
Click to expand...


Drew,

Do you have any stats from dealers in smaller markets?
 
#17
Joe -- isn't small subjective? <smile> Not all dealers share their data with me. But I can tell you what I have.

Dealer in Iowa - 44 vehicles, average price is 13k, 17094 VDP
Dealer in Oklahoma, 40 vehicles, average price is 12k, 16501 VDP
Dealer in Washington, 25 vehicles, average price is 13k, 8952 VDP

My VDP count ranges from 3,400 to 46,000, with car counts for dealers from 7 (yes I do REALLY small dealers) to 186. Even the dealer with 7 cars got 3700 VDP!

We test, launch, rinse and repeat...over and over - until we know what works for you and your dealership. Which is the same thing any of you are/should be doing. Tracking and monitoring for the best results. Price or no price, title header?, custom template or plain vanilla listing?...you need to experiment and see what works for YOU, your dealer, and your market. Joe made a good point in another post - he experimented and found that plain listings were better, another poster mentioned special characters in the title - it is all about what works for you.

The beauty of a service like ours - you can spend time experimenting yourself, or you can sell cars. Just make sure you, and/or the service you use, follows the "terms of service" from Craigslist.

 
#18
That being said, I tend to NOT list vehicles over 25K MSRP, new vehicles or luxury vehicles. Point above.
Click to expand...
Audi dealer, a BMW dealer, and a Mercedes dealer that I just looked at results - all 3 get excellent results. The BMW dealer carries nothing but used BMW's, average price is over 30k, 40 cars, 18000 VDPs.

Again, all about experimenting. I also think that sites like Craigslist, Backpage, etc are more mainstream now. The "average" person knows and uses, so you get better exposure.
 
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#19
Perhaps not as exhaustive as Drew's studies, but we recently toyed with switching from eBiz's plain-text posting (with a link and a little title cheese added by hand) to their HTML posts that add in the options. Same posting regimen (every car as it gets photographed, plus the oldest cars get reposted once or twice a day) as before. The traffic to our site dropped significantly, though it did hold roughly steady these past few days when traffic fell off during the winter storm that blew through here.

We'll be switching back.
 
#20
Drew, one last question for now. VDP for craigslist is simply referring to the number of views being received through CL?


Also, does anyone have some figures regarding a "target" for Vehicle Details Page compared to Search Results Page? Like 5% 10% or more?

Say dealer has XX vehicles and the vehicles show up in 35000 times and you get 2800 detail page requests (8%).

Seems like there isn't a ton of available statistics regarding this kind of thing...
 
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