Can I Tell if My Craigslist Ad Has Been Viewed?

There are several ways to know if people have viewed your Craigslist ad. Some of these ways are positive signs, meaning that people are interested enough in your ad to view it, but other indications don't bode well for your ad. Whatever the case, the knowledge you glean will help you take positive action for your Craigslist ad.

Craigslist

Craigslist doesn't provide any program or application for you to track your Craigslist ads. Basically, all that you can do after you post your ad is edit, renew, repost or delete it. Furthermore, Craigslist doesn't rank ads by popularity. So where your ad is placed relative to other ads on Craigslist isn't an indication of how many times it's been viewed. Rather, ads are time-based. The newer the ad is, the closer to the top of the list it is.

Services

At least two services claim to help you track your Craigslist ads: MonitorHits and ClickMeter (see Resources). From these services you get HTML code, which typically appears as a logo, embedded with a special Web link that you place in your ad. This Web link communicates with the service and logs how many times people have viewed your ad. Depending on the service, you might be charged a nominal fee.

Spam

If after posting your Craigslist ad you notice a sudden increase in random, irrelevant emails, then that could be an indication that spammers have viewed your ad. Some spammers troll Craigslist purely for the email addresses, even if they're anonymized. It's still considered best practice, though, to avoid putting your email address in the body of the ad, and to use Craigslist's anonymized email address service when placing the ad. The anonymized addresses remain active for only six months after their creation.

Ghosting

Ironically, another possible indication that someone has viewed your Craigslist ad is if you don't see it on Craigslist after you've posted it. Craigslist monitors ad postings via Craigslist staff and automated systems. If either of these perceive an ad as spam, they will prevent it from going live on the site after you try to post it. Craigslist users have noticed this happening while never receiving a message from Craigslist informing them that this has happened. Therefore, some have termed such occurrences as "ghosting" an ad. In such cases, it's possible that a Craigslist employee viewed your ad or an automated system "viewed" it. But either way, it means the general public did not.