5 Reasons Why Car Dealers Should Have Their Inventory On Craigslist

Last night I did an experiment on the Orlando Craigslist. I posted 6 cars within a span of 15 minutes using our Craigslist Posting Tool. Many car dealers don’t realize the instant traffic obtained from a Craigslist post.

We use live stats on all of our websites, and we can log in at any moment and see what’s going on. I had this software running in the background as I was making each post.

Reasons why you should:

• 1) Craigslist Is A Huge Source Of Traffic. These potential customers are on Craigslist because they are looking to buy a car.
• 2) Obtain Quality Traffic To Your Website From Each Vehicle: The idea is you want to get the user to visit your website, and get them off of Craigslist. You want them to see the rest of your inventory, so you need a call to action. We show all photos in our posts, and all but one are thumbnails. When the user clicks anything, they are brought to your actual page. As they scroll down they will see similar inventory, and we want them to keep clicking.
• 3) 90 Days Of Free Advertising with Keyword Search: Many dealers are unimpressed that their Craigslist post stays up for 90 days. They must realize that Craigslist has a keyword search. If a user searches for “Mustang” it will show all Mustangs posted within the last 90 days. The 6 posts alone I did will send several hundred visitors to that website in a 90 day period. If I did 6 posts a day, I would get thousands of visitors.
• 4) Leads You Wouldn’t Normally Get: Overnight we received 3 email leads so far, and a few phone calls already came in on a Sunday morning. Not bad for 15 minutes of work!
• 5) Craigslist Ads Show Up Frequently On Google Searches: For that 90 days period, each of your ads will show up on Google searches. Although Craigslist in no way dominates the Google Searches, it’s still a great source.

So now let’s look at the quality of the traffic. Besides our live stats, we use Google Analytics. People familiar with GA know it is a few hours behind in reporting, which is why I waited until this afternoon to check yesterday’s stats.

• Visits: From about 8:00PM to midnight, 47 people clicked a link on the ad that brought them to our website. Keep in mind, these are just the people that clicked from the ad. I’m sure hundreds of people saw each ad.
• Pages Per Visit: Out of the 47 visitors, the average person clicked 2.02 cars. With a bounce rate of 75%, that means that 12 people looked at more than one vehicle.
• Average Time On Site: 54 seconds doesn’t sound like much, but that’s a lot of time. Go to one of your vehicle listings and count to 54 while you look at the vehicle details.
• New Visits: 93.62% percent of the visitors have never been on this website before. This means that about 6.4% of the people from last night came back and took another look. Another words, 3 people clicked from Craigslist last night more than once.
• Bounce Rate: A bounce rate of 75 percent is expected because we link to each vehicle. They were presented with what the came for and hit their back button and moved on. But, 1 in 4 people chose to look at more vehicles which is what we want.

UPDATE:

After a full 24 hours I checked the stats for all Craigslist visitors. 168 people actually clicked through to the website, looking at an average of 2 cars or trucks each.

I looked deeper and 6 users actually spent over 10 minutes on the site looking at an average of 30 cars. This is what internet advertising is all about, and it’s up to you to get your inventory out there.

You want your inventory on Craigslist? Showroom Logic can do that for you. Call Mike at 863-666-0130 or send me an email: mike@showroomlogic.com