Craigslist Adds Hyperlink Option To Dealer Car Ads

Craigslist rolled out some updates this week, so for you dealers that are advertising on Craigslist, you got to get these done ASAP. So typically if we look at a regular Craigslist ad, it does not have a clickable URL Link at all.

And in order to visit this URL, the customer, if they're on searching mobile or on desktop, they're going to have to right-click, they're going to have to copy, they're going to have to drop that into the browser in order to visit that page. This is not a good user experience, a lot of potential shoppers may not go that far at all.

For dealers, it’s not good either because it is very hard to track those leads that were coming in from Craigslist. So a lot of dealers were saying Craigslist is old news because we're not getting a lot of leads from there.

But the truth is it was very difficult to track these leads coming from Craigslist, so if we look at another ad like this, this is a very poorly done ad just because this could be a spam link.

Yesterday, Craigslist launched a new feature for Car Dealers where we can embed the link directly in the description.

You may be thinking that it’s not a big deal because you already have your links to your site or VDP pages in your Craigslist Ads, but those are not clickable links.

This is the first clickable link Craigslist has added to automotive ads in over 10 years!

So you click on it, it opens up that vehicle, that VDP page for that dealer, and right off the bat, you're going to be able to track that as a Craigslist lead, especially if you're doing referral code tracking.

If you're tracking it in analytics, if you're tracking any of your texts or get financed forms or anything like that, you're going to be able to track this directly either on your analytics or in your CRM.

And this is something that's really easy to implement.

So your software provider needs to get on this ASAP. I highly doubt any other software providers are taking advantage of this, yet everyone's kind of putting Craigslist on the back burner and focusing on the shiny new objects like your TikToks and your Facebook marketing and retargeting, which is all great, but there's so much value on Craigslist that a lot of dealers aren't taking advantage of.

Let’s get this updated asap!

Happy holidays.

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