Rogue Car Dealers Using Software To Automatically Flag Other Dealers On Craigslist
This Dirty Little Tool Will Flag Any Post You Want
Craigslist is a great way for an aggressive internet sales manager to get some decent leads. Last week, one of the dealers I service was complaining about getting flagged. He thought it was odd because he was getting flagged so fast.
Craigslist never has told us how many different people it takes to have a listing flagged, but many people feel it’s between 8 and 11. The flagging needs to come from all different IP addresses. This dealer was getting flagged in minutes, and there was no way that 8 to 11 people were sitting around waiting for him to post just so they could flag his listings.
Even with semi automatic posting tools, it still takes some time to post your listings. It can be very frustrating if you spend a better part of your morning posting your new or used inventory online only to get flagged later on.
The problem is there is now software available to have anyone flagged you wish. This software will hide behind a proxy so all of your flags will come from a different ip address, so it will look genuine to Craigslist. I blurred out the name of the software just because I think it’s garbage. If you look at the screen shot, you simply copy and paste all of the url’s you want to flag.
This is a dirty trick, and I would never endorse such a black hat method. If you see this happening toyou, lay low for a while. I post many times for many different dealers, and I don’t get flagged. Here are a couple of tips to prevent flagging:
1) Do not post a whole bunch of cars at once. This annoys people, and you will only catch the attention of the rogue dealer and the genuine people who will flag you for real.
2) Post no more than 5 vehicles a day, and do it either early in the morning or later on at night. I usually wait until after 10:00PM because the other dealers are sleeping. My best results come from posting on a Saturday night. Many people browse the car listings on a Sunday morning because they are bored. How do I know this? We use live stats, and it will tell me when somebody visited out website from a Craigslist posting.
Watch Your Traffic Come In Live. These are only the people that clicked through to our website. This doesn't count the hundreds of people who just clicked the ad.
One Craiglsist posting will stay live for 90 days, and it’s important to realize that. Craigslist has a keyword search tool, so one post will get 90 days of traffic. If you posted a 2008 Ford Mustang anyone who searches for that term will see your ad. It’s also important to remember that Craigslist posts show up in Google searches.
If you post 5 vehicles a day, that’s 150 cars a month. If you use a posting tool, be sure it includes multiple links to your website. What you really want is to get the user off of Craigslist and send them to your website. That’s what our tool is designed for, and it works.
For one of my dealers in Florida, I average about 300 visitors to their website a month from Craigslist alone. Showroom Logic also tracks impressions. You can easily do this as well if you host the image on your own server. Let’s say you post a 2007 Dodge Ram. The Ram will have it’s own image name, and you can look at your weblog to see how many hits it received.
One of my dealers has a 2007 Jeep Wrangler that received 3,000 hits so far, so that goes to show you how many people are looking. Some states like Utah don’t really use Craigslist, but Orlando Florida is one of the hottest markets in the country for Craigslist.
If your dealership doesn’t have a good Craigslist tool than I recommend you sign up for Showroom Logic. For only $300.00 a year, your live inventory can be added to our network of websites and you will have unlimited use of our Craigslist tool.
Send mike@showroomlogic.com an email to get started. We currently service any car dealership (new or used) in the United States.
5 Reasons Why Car Dealers Should Have Their Inventory On Craigslist
Live Visitors From 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.
47 Visits In About 4 Hours Last Night
- 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:
Updated Craigslist Stats
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