I have been doing research on internet marketing since 2002. Both in a pure academic style as well as in a casual entertainment style.From last month, I begin to explore the effectiveness of Craigslist marketing.

Many fellow agents use Craiglist to market their inventory. It is free if you do not count the time you spend in posting those ads.

Last month, I begin to wonder how and when each ad is clicked. Where those clicks might come from.

Apparrently, craigslist does not have this kind of tracking system. Actually, few people even know they can log this. So I designed a program using Php and Sqlite database to log all those clicks.

I put three kinds of  ads out: one is a business for sale, one is a pure real estate advertisement and the other is a computer item for sale.

Clicks	Business for sale	Real Estate ads	Computer item
1 day	35	68	90
1 week	55	80	202
1 month	65	92	357

 
The above are the responses I received.

During this tracking period, there are lots of clicks from robots. So I put a filter to filter all those robots out. during the deleting of those robots results, there might be some clicks that are missing. But it does not affect the general results.

Of all these clicks, only about two requests on the Real Estate ads and about 6 from the business for sale and 9 are from the computer item (excludes 3 spam requests from Nigeria and London).

Most of the computer requests are received during the 24 hours. The Real Estate are recived during the first week. The business for sale requests are around 3 days but I do receive requests after around 10 days.

The conclusion? It seems that for physical items, it is better to post it very often. ideally, on a 3 day basis. For business for sale ads, I would do maybe 10 days. Real Estate Ads, I would repost after around 1 week.

Next, I will do a test on ads with/without pictures.

One interesting finding: among all the clics, about a little bit less than 1/3 are using Firefox browsers and a little bit less than 2/3 are using IE. Very few people use browsers othen than those two. The rests include: cell browsers, Mac Safari, PDA browsers. They are rare but they exist.

For realtors, if you would like to do the same kind of tracking, please contact me.

Disclaimer: This research result is for entertainment purpose only. It is not to be used as a research result as the sample are not big enough.