On December 1, 2016, Craigslist, the 16th most popular website in the United States, changed how the trailer industry listed ads by enacting a $ 5 charge / ad. Now, dealers must allocate a budget and determine if there is an ROI for Craigslist.
Prior to the market being paid, dealers could list as many ads as they wanted for free. A dealer could post 500 ads and only a fraction of those would remain live on the site due to flagging and ghosting. Now that Craigslist is paid, flagging and ghosting are no more.
Dealers who posted 500 ads at $ 5 each would now need to spend $ 2,500 to see those same results right? Wrong! The data we analyzed will help you understand how many ads you should list to ensure your dealership reaches its revenue goals.
Why did Craigslist go paid for Trailer dealers? When Craigslist was free, dealers tended to spam the marketplace by posting the same Trailer multiple times, cross posting to too many marketplaces and posting in the wrong categories. Now that Craigslist is paid, those days are gone and ads are valid for 30 days. The user experience for consumers has become more friendly and cleaner with a true representation of local dealer inventory.
Let’ s Analyze the Data When dealers heard the news about Craigslist going paid, they either embraced it and pulled out their checkbook or they shut it down and decided to no longer post ads.
We looked at the data from our Trailer dealers who use LotVantage to post on Craigslist and found very positive results.
October 2016- Free Marketplace Trailer dealers posted 3,380 Trailers using the LotVantage software on Craigslist. Those ads generated. 20 leads per ad.
December 2016- Paid Marketplace Trailer dealers posted 613 Trailers using the LotVantage software on Craigslist. Those ads generated 1.55 leads per ad.
Once Craigslist went paid, Trailer dealers saw exponentially better results and the reason why is simple. The number of Trailer ads posted through LotVantage went from 3,380 to 613. The dealers that decided to stay on Craigslist really benefited because consumer behavior didn’ t change. Craigslist had fewer ads and each ad was generating an average of. 1.55 leads / per ad.
What budget should you dedicate to Craigslist? Figuring out what budget to dedicate to Craigslist takes some simple math, knowing what your close ratio is and what sales volume you are looking to accomplish. We’ ll use the LotVantage posting data we analyzed to give you an example.
In December 2016, Trailer dealers posting through our software saw 1.55 leads / ad.
Let’ s say your dealership closes 5 % of leads that come in and your dealership needs to sell 6 additional trailers a month. You would need to post 78 ads, costing your dealership $ 390.
22 NATDA Magazine www. natda. org