Why does Craigslist flag the Dealership ADs on Craigslist for deletion? It is not necessarily Craigslist is flagging dealership ADs for deletion. As the rules for flagging the ADs for deletion becoming complicated with Craigslist platform growing so fast in automotive industry, both the dealers and vendors can only minimize the flagging of dealership ADs for deletion.
Craigslist also supports any visitor to flag the dealership ADs for deletion or even to mark it as spam. Just like competing dealers like to have Bill Boards at the entrances of each other dealership locations, even the competing dealerships in the area can flag each other dealers ADs for deletion on Craigslist, so that their counterpart will have less number of ADs on the Craigslist and hence their own dealership ADs will be presented in search results on the top. The vendors could be doing their job of posting the ADs, but rivalry between competing dealership can bring different challenges in posting the craigslist ADs in the area. This is often true in tier-2 metro cities, where the dealerships watch for the penetration of their Craigslist ADs in comparison with the local competing dealers. Typically, the dealers could get frustrated with flagging effect as if it is the responsibility of the posting vendor, but it should be dealt with more innovative ways to reduce this specific problem.
Apart from this issue of rival dealerships flagging the ADs for deletion, Craigslist itself introduced whole slew of reasons for flagging the dealership ADs in the month of March and April 2013.
For all practical purposes, you may have 100s of ADs out flagged for deletion. It is suggested that the dealership and posting vendor become partners, try to understand the flagging for deletion can only be reduced by changing the patterns of posting the ADs and AD creation techniques with software changes and it can never eliminated. DealTimer does not want to publish several in-house adapted techniques for posting the ADs to have minimal effect of flagging the ADs for deletion, because, these techniques were only figured out with trial and error only and they are not guaranteed to be applicable in other cities and other posting methods and patterns.
Are your dealership ADs flagged for deletion by Craigslist?
- There are several challenges in posting Craigslist ADs and minimizing the effect of flagging the ADs for deletion and ghosting the ADs.
- It can be very time consuming and frustrating to figure out the patterns for flagging the ADs for deletion.
- During the period of figuring out the reasons for flagging the ADs for deletion, the reductions in number of phone calls or lead submission should not considered as a failure of service and often dealers ask for credit in their monthly invoices from the vendors. It is during this period, the vendors have to put more time than normal period to post additional ADs to counter the effect of flagging the ADs for deletion and also research on the patterns for flagging the ADs for deletion. In fact this is the period, the vendors need to be compensated for their additional time of researching and figuring out the problem and improve the results within a month or two. Typically competing vendors try to excite the frustrated used car manager with minimal results and cancel the contract and re-sign with another vendor with rosy promises of dramatically improved results on Craigslist.
- It is very important to distinguish the Craigslist posting service not to be compared with vehicle photo service. In case of vehicle photo service, the only external problems of poor performance from the photo taking vendor are with the rain and the low lighting conditions for vehicle photo operations. Whereas with Craigslist posting services, the external influences of flagging the ADs for deletion and ghosting are utterly random, change from city to city, based on the competition, the number of ADs posted from the account or IP address used for posting the ADs, telephone number used for verifying the AD posting service, etc.
