Craigslist has become a very powerful tool for many real estate professionals.  We typically recommend posting your listings to Craigslist.  It is also a great place to post events like Home Buyer Seminars, general ads like “Receive a FREE Market Analysis of Your Homes Value”, and even for recruiting new agents.

As Real Estate Virtual Assistants, the online marketing efforts that we implement can be pretty extensive.  At RealSupport, we provide package pricing per listing for listing marketing and we are often asked to recommend the best sites for advertising our client’s listing.  I’m a big believer in Craigslist (however, I do realize there are reasons it doesn’t make sense for some agents), so this site is typically part of each of my client’s listing marketing plans. 

Some of our clients spend upwards of $400 for us to market their listings. We want to be certain they are getting the most bang for their marketing dollars.  In search of a tool that would allow us to make sure we have the data to back-up our positive opinion about Craigslist, we have been testing a free tool call http://craigslistadtracker.com/ that can be used to track the activity of each Craigslist ad.  So far we have found this tool to be easy to use, accurate, and consistent in providing us hit reports on each ad. 

With that said, perhaps we find the result to be the opposite and our ads are not being viewed… before you throw out the baby with the bathwater, I recommend tweaking your ad title.  On a similar note, if you are posting your ads with HTML code from some other source (like Postlets), you MUST still upload a photo. Most Craigslist users will not click on an ad that does not have a PIC (which is the notification next to the title indicating there is a picture uploaded to the ad).  I did not like the way the uploaded photo looked with the attractive HTML code from Postlets, so we tricked the system and we upload a blank image… now the ad still looks nice and the ad indicates there are pictures (which of course there is because that is part of the HTML).

How it works

1. Register an account
2. Create a tracker
3. Insert the tracking code on your craigslist ad or webpage
4. Every page view will be logged for reporting
5. Analyze the report

Why use this service?

1. Know the number of page views your ads receive
2. Know which type of ad gets the most clicks or generate more leads
3. Know your visitor locations
4. Up-to-the-minute real-time stats
5. Email notifications
6. Track unlimited postings
7. Several reports and charts to help you analyze your stats
8. Invisible and seamless tracking
9. Timezone conversion for reporting
10. Image hosting and tracking
11. It works on Craigslist, Oddle, Myspace and other networks that support HTML listings
12. It is simple and FREE to use

You can’t manage what you don’t measure! Click here to create an account.

If all this sound just a little to complicated, you need a Real Estate Virtual Assistant!  Let a REVA do the work for you… all you should worry about are the results, right?

Carrie Gable
President