Will Craig Sue You?

There has been some serious spamming going on throughout the United States in the Craigslist used cars section. Vendors have been popping up left and right promising to post a dealer’s entire inventory on Craiglist every week.

Some charged as much as $1,500.oo a month. I’m sure the poor Joe who was looking for a car on Craigslist (and Craig himself) was getting pretty annoyed. Besides the keyword search, there is absolutely no organization when it comes to look for a car or truck. I wonder how anyone could possibly have a pleasant experience sifting through the garbage looking for a vehicle. I’m sure most select the “cars and trucks by owner” from the drop-down or exit the site and go to Google, Cars.com or AutoTrader.

As of yesterday, things have been tough for the spammers (yeah!). Today, I did a little experiment in the Tampa Florida section:

1. I Manually posted the old fashioned way, with some text and a clickable image. Within 1o minutes this post showed up. (I did have to re-verify the phone number)

2. Using another account I used software to post. Craigslist immediately made me re-verify not only the email address, but the phone number as well. I went through the process, and everything went smooth. But..my add was “ghosted”.

‘Ghosting’ is the term applied to when you make a post on Craigslist, and the system tells you that your post has been published but your post never appears on the front page of Craigslist. The system gives you a post ID and a URL and you can see your post if you put the post’s URL in your browser, but unfortunately no one else will be able to see it because it will never appear on the front page. Your post becomes like a ghost wandering the back halls of Craigslist aimlessly looking for someone to look at it, but no one can see it.

One spam company even tries to add various poetic versus to each listing to trick Craigslist into thinking each is unique. One post in the Tampa section was advertising a few different vehicles, and on the bottom they put:

“The pancreas produces Insulin. There are 10 human body parts that are only 3 letters long (eye hip arm leg ear toe jaw rib lip gum). For every one Australian there are 2 Australian kangaroos The average person spends about 2 years on the phone in a lifetime.”

I actually hope this sticks, because the dealership I work for plays by the rules. About twice a week I wait for the spammers to finish (usually between 9 and 10 PM) and I’ll throw just a few on there. If I won’t be allowed to use my software that will be fine with me. I can do it the old fashioned way.

Is Craigslist Going To Sue Car Dealers?

The Buzz At Last Weeks Digital Dealer Conference In Las Vegas (I made the important words bold below)

There was a lot of chatting going on about the Craigslist Terms Of Use. Go ahead and read it, but I’ll skip to sections that caught my eye and post them here:

v) post non-local or otherwise irrelevant Content, repeatedly post the
same or similar Content or otherwise impose an unreasonable or
disproportionately large load on our infrastructure;

y) use any form of automated device or computer program that enables the
submission of postings on craigslist without each posting being manually
entered by the author thereof (an "automated posting device"), including
without limitation, the use of any such automated posting device to submit
postings in bulk, or for automatic submission of postings at regular intervals.

8. POSTING AGENTS

A "Posting Agent" is a third-party agent, service, or intermediary
that offers to post Content to the Service on behalf of others. To
moderate demands on craigslist's resources, you may not use a Posting
Agent to post Content to the Service without express permission or
license from craigslist.  Correspondingly, Posting Agents are not
permitted to post Content on behalf of others, to cause Content to
be so posted, or otherwise access the Service to facilitate posting
Content on behalf of others, except with express permission or
license from craigslist.

This part is from section 12:
craigslist permits you to display on your website, or create a hyperlink
on your website to, individual postings on the Service so long as such use
is for noncommercial and/or news reporting purposes only (e.g., for use in
personal web blogs or personal online media).  If the total number of such
postings displayed or linked to on your website exceeds one hundred (100)
postings, your use will be presumed to be in violation of the TOU,
absent express permission granted by craigslist to do so.  You may also
create a hyperlink to the home page of craigslist sites so long as the
link does not portray craigslist, its employees, or its affiliates in a
false, misleading, derogatory, or otherwise offensive matter.

Here's the kicker in section 19:
b. If craigslist establishes limits on the frequency with which you may
access the Service, or terminates your access to or use of the Service, you
agree to pay craigslist one hundred dollars ($100) for each message posted
in excess of such limits or for each day on which you access craigslist in
excess of such limits, whichever is higher.

d. If you post Content in violation of the TOU, other than as described
above, you agree to pay craigslist one hundred dollars ($100) for each
Item of Content posted.  In its sole discretion, craigslist may elect
to issue a warning before assessing damages.

e. If you are a Posting Agent that uses the Service in violation of the
TOU, in addition to any liquidated damages under clause (d), you agree to
pay craigslist one hundred dollars ($100) for each and every Item you post
in violation of the TOU.  A Posting Agent will also be deemed an agent of
the party engaging the Posting Agent to access the Service (the
"Principal"), and the Principal (by engaging the Posting Agent in
violation of the TOU) agrees to pay craigslist an additional one hundred
dollars ($100) for each Item posted by the Posting Agent on behalf of
the Principal in violation of the TOU.

Now I am not a lawyer, but I see something here. Imagine getting fined 100.00 per post? I know a dealer in Chicago that gets 1,500 hundred posts a month from a vendor. That’s 150,000.00 a month it could cost them.

Remember a few months ago when Craigslist shut down their erotic services section? Well they stand do lose 44 Million Dollars annually, so what better way to make up for it? Sick their lawyers after the companies with money…car dealers.

Newest & Fastest Tool For Craigslist

Having an internet sales staff of 6 full time employees gives Mike at Park Auto Mall plenty of help meeting internet shoppers half way. They’ve always been posting their inventory to Craigslist, but it was hard to keep the staff motivated because they know the lead will come to the internet department and whomever answers the phone will get the lead.

With the help of Showroom Logic’s newest Craigslist tool, the problem is solved. Each salesperson can now not only post automatically, but they can have the ads go to any website they want and they can use their own cell phones numbers for the ad.

Since they started using this last week, the amount of self generated leads have quadrupled. Mike says “I usually come home at night and post about 5 vehicles on Craigslist. After I post I always look at who else is posting at the same time. Lately I have been competing with my own staff, and it’s great to see the tool getting used by the hungry ones.”

Mike loves it when they do it from home because it’s a different IP and we don’t have to worry about Craiglist suspending our accounts. Some of them even have their spouses do it.

What I like best about this software is my staff doesn’t have to log in to any website to use the tool, so I don’t have to give them any passwords and they can do it from home as well

“It’s a win win for our dealership and the staff. Some people will click through to our money site, which is what I want. This weekend alone, we had over 2oo people click from Craigslist and the bounce rate was only 8%. The average amount of vehicles looked at was 15 and the average time on site was 13 minutes. Online credit applications are up over 600%, and obviously the leads and appointments are up as well. What I like best about this software is my staff doesn’t have to log in to any website to use the tool, so I don’t have to give them any passwords and they can do it from home as well. They simply go to the posting page on Craigslist and the boxes appear. I have about 6 different vendors that include Craigslist posting tools, but I don’t use any of them. Why would I want to take the time logging into a website’s backend and choosing templates when I don’t have to?”, says Mike.

Mike also does some experimenting. Sometimes he’ll have the add click to one of their high definition YouTube Videos, and sometimes their blog. But he especially likes being able to point to our main money site. “Just because my staff is posting now doesn’t mean I’ll stop”, he says.

Here are a couple of screenshots of the new tool: (Click each to enlarge)

Now Our Car Dealers Have Full Control Over What Website You Want The Viewers To Click To, & What Phone Number To Place On The Ad. The 3 boxes on the top is all you need to fill in. When you click "load" everything fills in automatically

Whichever phone number you included will be displayed on the ad. When a user clicks any of the photos or more details they customer will be brought to whatever url you pout in the box

This Craigslist tool comes with a complete microsite and is available for only $200.00 a month. Contact Patrick Bennett at 801.400.9178 to get started or email us at sales@showroomlogic.com.

White labeling is available.

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.

]]> http://www.showroomlogic.com/blog/car-dealers-getting-flagged-on-craigslist-from-other-rogue-car-dealers.html/feed 7 http://www.showroomlogic.com/blog/5-reasons-why-car-dealers-post-craigslist.html http://www.showroomlogic.com/blog/5-reasons-why-car-dealers-post-craigslist.html#comments Sun, 22 Nov 2009 18:41:56 +0000 Mike http://www.showroomlogic.com/blog/?p=162

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