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Tracking Clicks from Craigslist

November 1, 2007

As Craigslist does not provide information on page views or clicks, I have devised a few methods to determine how many clicks come from a particular ad. Some of these require programming knowledge and some do not, but all are good for tracking your campaigns.

How You Can Track Campaigns

These same methods can be used with any link campaign which is not hosted on your own site and which you are not able to see the statistics for:

  • Use Referring Pages (easy)
    Install Google Analytics on your site according to their instructions. In your analytics dashboard, click on "Traffic Sources" and then "Referring Sites". In the listing of referring sites, click on "craigslist.org" (or whatever site you are getting traffic from) and you will get a listing of what pages the clicks are coming from. If you don’t see the site you are looking for on the list, it means you have not received any clicks from that site.
  • Use Landing Pages and Stats (medium)
    Set up a special landing page for your campaign that will only be used for that campaign, like
    http://www.yoursite.com/craigslist-ad-0237485.html
    In your ad, link to that page. Then use your site’s stats program to see how many people landed on that page.
  • Use Databases and PHP (hard)
    Set up a database to collect hit counts on your server. (I’m not going to explain how to do that here, so if you need help, you’ll have to consult a pro.) Using PHP or another programming language, write a script that will add a count in the database every time someone hits your front page based on a campaign number. Then, when you create your add, append that campaign number to your URL in the ad. For example, your URL might look like
    http://www.yoursite.com/index.php?campaign=20
    and that would put a line in your database that said one hit from campaign number 20.

Tracking page views for your ad is a little more tricky. If you’d like to track page views, I suggest making an image that only appears in one ad at a time, even if it is just a 1px by 1px invisible gif. Link that image from your site in your ad, and then you can use your web hosting server’s logs to determine how many times that one file was downloaded. This will give you an approximate number of page views for your ad.

Why You Should Track Campaigns

Tracking your campaign has many benefits, including:

  • Testing Content
    You can set up multiple pages with variations on wording to see which type of ad gets the most clicks and determine the most effective wording.
  • Tracking Campaign Effectiveness
    Putting up and monitoring ads takes time and effort, so it’s important to know which ads and advertising sources are worth your time.

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