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Traffic Sources?

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#11
Just my two cents, but based on the analytics data provided, craigslist is providing traffic at a minimum double the bounce rate of the other traffic sources. Craigslist does sell cars, but so do AutoTrader and Cars.com. I would be curious to see what the site average was for bounce rate and compare that to the craigslist traffic. I would really like to see goal conversions for all the traffic with a definition of the goals tracked to better analyze the data in this post.

You can go put up cheap facebook CPC ads and get even more traffic; however, the traffic sucks - bounce rate, time on site, page views, et al. ALL shitty... Believe me, I'm not a big fan of either cars.com or autotrader - they are both a necessary evil unfortunately...
 
#12
I completely agree with you guys that CL is a clunky, spam ridden, pile of junk, that can be a real pain to deal with (both on seller and buyer side). But it is bringing traffic. I too also wonder what the bounce rate is and if this traffic is converting or not. This is something I would like to look into as well.

One thing that I think is incredibly funny/annoying with CL is from the perspective as a website system provide to dealerships.

When our dealers use our Craiglist posting tool, it adds a statement saying the ad was posted by our posting tool. Customers are constantly scrolling through the ad, skipping past the link to the vehicle, the link to the dealer home page, the phone number of the dealer, the email of the dealer, the links to the pictures . . . etc and click on the "posted by AutoCorner" link at the very bottom.

They then call us up at the office and say "I'd like to buy your 2001 Honda Civic". Each time we are like "what? -- we do not sell cars dude". These people would even go to our AutoCorner main website, (which says everywhere that we make websites for car dealers) and click on the "contact us" link and ask about the car they saw. Some people really are not that bright.

We ended up having to make a special landing page ( Craigslist Posting Tool for Automotive Dealers - AutoCorner ) that the Craigslist tool links to that has "* NOTE ** -- We do NOT SELL CARS. We provide websites for car dealers. If you followed this link from craigslist and are looking for a car please click the back button and call the dealer directly!" in a large h1 tag at the top of the screen.

After this statement there are screen shots and information about our tool so dealers that clicked on the link can see how our system works. This has "slowed" down the requests from "car buyers" to only 2 or 3 a month, but still some idiots manage to get confused and call us about the car they saw on CL. . . wow
 
#13
tomwhitejr said:
Just my two cents, but based on the analytics data provided, craigslist is providing traffic at a minimum double the bounce rate of the other traffic sources. Craigslist does sell cars, but so do AutoTrader and Cars.com. I would be curious to see what the site average was for bounce rate and compare that to the craigslist traffic. I would really like to see goal conversions for all the traffic with a definition of the goals tracked to better analyze the data in this post.

You can go put up cheap facebook CPC ads and get even more traffic; however, the traffic sucks - bounce rate, time on site, page views, et al. ALL shitty... Believe me, I'm not a big fan of either cars.com or autotrader - they are both a necessary evil unfortunately...
Click to expand...


From what little data I have collected over the past few months, the bounce rate IS significantly higher than organic traffic from Google. The difference is that our CL posting tool takes our customers right to the vehicle details page.. So they read that page and either call, close it out or navigate the rest of the site. The time spent on our website is much lower too but, again it is a direct route to the vehicle they are interested in.

IMO, when I search CL and find a car I like, click the "view more pictures" link and it takes me to the dealership's home page, that is frustrating. I usually just close out and continue searching. If someone is highly interested, I'm sure they will search the site for it but if a dealer grabs someone's attention (Say a vehicle they weren't directly looking for, a Ford instead of a Dodge) and then makes them navigate through the site, you have a high chance of losing that customer.
 
#16
traffic.jpg

Here is an updated chart showing the traffic for the past week. 70% of traffic is coming from Google and Craigslist.

Since a few have asked about carsforsale in here, they were # 43 in ranking with 44 unique hits sent to the dealer's websites.
 
#20
JoePistell said:
Here's the path, HTH

Google Analytics >> Advanced Segments >> Create a new advanced segment >> Dimensions >> Traffic Sources >> Keyword >> Condition: "Does Not Match Exactly" >> Value: add ALL dealer name keywords
Click to expand...

For the year long study of the data each website had its own tracking code, so Advanced Segments will not work because that would be limited to that one site.

For the week's data I wrote some scripts to analyze the apache access logs to figure out the referring host. I can work on those scripts to filter out based upon the keywords, but that will take some planning to get it to work.

Steven
 
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