Craigslist Tracking Tactics

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Tracking your ads on Craigslist is not as cut and dry as ebay or other online auction or shopping websites. The fundamental difference is that Craigslist does not participate in the sales process. This means sellers need to come up with their own system for tracking the effectiveness and conversion of a campaign.

There is a pro to Craigslist indifference towards commerce; it allows sellers to test out ad concepts and other tactics without incurring fees. This changes the usual game we play when defining an ad’s objective or goal. The need to crunch data and perfect a concept is less an issue on Craigslist. First off, there is no open data to crunch – Craigslist does not share data. This means sellers do not know how many people post or answer posts, what categories are most popular in each city or the busiest times during the day.

There is a way to piece this information together using your own web statistics and e-mail tactics. For those of you that do not check your stats or even have them, now is the time to get onboard and learn how to use your stats to your advantage. Great web stats do not need to cost big bucks, simply sign up for Google Analytics, a free and very useful stats program. Implementation is as easy as pasting a script into your website pages.

Once you have stats running you can start to build your information roadmap.

To know what categories and cities produced look in “Referrals”

To know the best time to place an ad, test out 3 times per day (morning, lunch hour and dinner hour). Watch as your web visitors spike during those times to see which produces the most traffic.

Want to know which ad is working best? Set-up each ad to go to a specific landing page. Then track referrals into each landing page to know which produced the best. If you don’t have the capability to create landing pages, simply ad the following code to the end of your link:

Change the ad number to differentiate under referrals which link brought in more traffic.

There are many other ways you can track your campaigns, including e-mail target specific tracking and even down to the sale conversion tracking. I provide further detail for basic and advanced methods in the book. Check it out: