How To Test Your Craigslist Ads

Testing is really the life blood of any kind of advertising.

Posting to Craigslist can be a powerful way to drive traffic to your website. There’s a lot of competition for attention on that site. You need to have a powerful headline in order to get the attention of your prospect.

It seems so many people take an ad I design for them and throw it up on craigslist and hope for the best.

I guess they feel that is all they have to do. Wrong Wrong, Wrong.

Your title headline on your post is so important I can’t even begin to tell you. When you invest in an eye popping ad and never really test the headline you are losing out

There are no analytics on craigslist, just ads, and they will strip out java script. So how do you test? It’s actually very simple. Each ad I design for you will have an embedded non java script hit counter in it. Keep some notes in an spreadsheet. List your headlines in a column and another column to record your hits and another column for your ad posting link, so you can go to it directly to check your hits. Simply record the hits you see on your hit counter way at the bottom of the ad, it will be faint and discrete. Most people will not even scroll down that far so don’t worry about anyone seeing it.

I even have a quick sample below of what it would look like. When you order an ad just ask and I will send it to you along with your craigslist ad design. then you can customize it yourself. Copy it and place into google docs so you can easily adust it without eating up more space on your hard drive.

As a good example a recent client posted his new ad several times. Each with a new title headline and each ad had a separate hit counter in it (I provide that when you order a new craigslist ad design).

The result was amazing. He found that some headlines got more hits than others because of the embeded hit counter he knew which headines were working and which one fell short. Then he was able to post some more ads working around the best headline changing each one slightly and really honed in on what was working. So what was the result?

A $5,000 sale and a reduction of his newspaper budget from $1,000 a month to $300 a month. The results were seen in about 3 days.

Now that is how it is done. Test Test Test. It doesn’t matter what you call it A/B testing or multivariate testing just get out there and test them.

Below is a sample spreadsheet you can model. Create it in google docs for ease of use.

It’s free no up-sells nothing just the spreadsheet.