Recently Craigslist decided to put the kibosh on ads with embedded photos and links. In an instant, Craigslst real estate agent ads suddenly have become text only and bland. Now anyone using Craigslist to search for real estate wound up staying on Craigslist.com. For the marketing savvy real estate agents out there this was a big upset in lead generation.
What Happened?
Over the past 3-5 years plenty of Craigslisters began using basic HTML in their ads when they posted. Over time ads became much more dynamic to the point that certain companies sprouted up giving real estate agents pre-formatted templates for their listings to post on Craigslist. Some of the larger real estate companies even went so far as to spam Craigslist with all of their listings every few hours to maintain popularity on the web site and most importantly maintain current search rankings. The savvy Realtors realised they could embed multiple links and photos in an ad to get users from Craigslist right into their respective websites. For those of you not familier with an embedded photo an example is below of my sales team.
For some real estate agents, this became a highly effective channel of gaining web traffic and more importantly web leads. This lasted into the 2000s and up until November of this year.
So What Did Craigslist do?
Early on Craiglist knew this was a problem and enacted rules about the frequency to which users post ads--but this became overlooked by many users and not enforced by Craigslist. In 2012 through 2014 nearly every top producing agent and sales team out there was posting all sorts of ads on Craigslist for all sorts of real estate related services. It truly became taken advantage of by the real estate industry. So last month Craigslist pulled the plug....
So Now What?
Good question: it remains to be seen if Craigslist will allow embedded links and photos in the future. We are not counting it any changes moving forward, Craigslist is now of very little use for real estate agents out there to market their services and listings. Moving forward agents will have to focus on other areas of the web to guide traffic to their respective sites for lead capture. Successful Realtors will focus on areas of the web like content, blogging, video, press releases, other ad sites and social media will be important moving into 2014.
Comments (2)Subscribe to CommentsComment