Last week I attended Inman's Agent ReBoot here in Chicago. One of my favorite presentations came fro
m a company called RentJuice who went through the results of a study they did on how to effectively post to Craigslist. Their white paper studied Rental postings, but I imagine the results are applicable to real estate as well. A lot of their finding flew in the face of what I assumed to be best Craigslist practices!
Click here to read the full report, but here are some teasers:
1. Post rentals on the weekend- Their data shows that if you post on Sunday, the ad was viewed an average of 27 times before expiring, verses ads posted on Wednesday received an average of 19 views. Friday was the worst day, with only 18 average views.
I wouldn't have expected this, because I imagine more people are at their computers during the week. However, they reasoned that more people are also posting during the week, meaning your ad won't appear on the first page of results as long. They found 18% of ads are posted on Wednesdays, where 8% are posted on Sunday.
2. Post in the PM - It appear the same principles in the first point of posting on slower days, also applies here. 50% of ads are posted between 10AM and 4PM, with 11AM-12PM being the most popular. Their data showed that ads posted between 6PM - 10PM averaged 26 views, verses an average of 19 views for the day time posts.
3. Use proper capitalization- Ok, I am majorly guilty of this one. I FEEL LIKE THIS GETS MORE ATTENTION!!! Turns out people want to be talked to by professionals in a professional manner. All caps lock titles got an average of 18 views, verses properly capitalized titles received 26 average views.
4. Carefully think about how you use templates (think Postlets or vFlyer) -They didn't have a lot of actual data around this, but it is an interesting thing to think about. Do you use the same template as everyone else? If so, if people may get accustom to seeing the same template. They may think they've already seen the home and disregard the ad, if the template is too familiar to them. Actually, the less commercial the ad appears, the better reaction it got. So test your templates, see if one works better than another. And make sure you aren't sacrificing load time with the extra HTML.
Hopefully this post helps you have more success with your Craigslist ads, and a big shout out to RentJuice for the data!
Comments(17)