How to Track Craigslist Ads with Google Analytics

Craigslist is one of the internet's original traffic drivers, but let's be honest - it often feels like a black box for advertisers. You post an ad, you get a few emails or phone calls, but you’re left wondering: Did that spike in website traffic last Tuesday come from my new ad, or something else entirely? To make smarter decisions, you need to know which of your Craigslist efforts are actually working. This article will show you exactly how to track your Craigslist ad performance directly within Google Analytics using a simple but powerful technique.

Why Is It So Hard to Track Craigslist Performance?

The core challenge with tracking Craigslist is that it doesn't offer any built-in analytics integration. When someone clicks a link in your ad and visits your site, Google Analytics typically just records the visit as "Direct" traffic. This happens because Craigslist often obscures the referring source, lumping high-intent visitors from your ads with people who typed your URL directly into their browser.

This leaves you with frustratingly vague questions:

• Which of my five different ads is driving the most clicks?
• Are people from the "for sale" section more valuable than those from the "services" section?
• Did the specific ad I posted for the San Francisco market actually bring visitors from that area?

Without clear data, you're making decisions based on hunches. The good news is, you can solve this problem for free using a method all digital marketers should know: UTM parameters.

The Secret Weapon: Understanding UTM Parameters

UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) parameters are simple tags you add to the end of your website link. They act like a digital breadcrumb trail, telling Google Analytics exactly how a visitor found your site. When someone clicks a UTM-tagged link, that information is sent back and neatly organized in your analytics reports.

There are five standard UTM parameters, but for Craigslist, we’ll focus on the three most important ones:

• utm_source: Identifies where the traffic is coming from. For our purposes, this will always be craigslist. This tells Google Analytics to group all clicks from this source together.
• utm_medium: Explains the type of link used. Common mediums include 'email,' 'social,' or 'cpc' (cost-per-click). We'll use cpc because you typically pay a fee to post an ad, making it a form of online advertising.
• utm_campaign: Describes the specific ad or promotion. This is where you can get creative and add valuable context. You could name it after the product you're selling (e.g., antique_dining_table), the service you're offering (fall_landscaping_promo), or a location (san_francisco_listing).

By combining these tags, you create a unique, trackable link that feeds rich data directly into your Google Analytics account.

How to Create and Use a Trackable Link for Craigslist Ads: A Step-by-Step Guide

Getting this up and running is straightforward. You don't need to write any code or have deep technical skills. Just follow these four steps.

Step 1: Get Your Destination URL

First, decide where you want to send people who click the link in your ad. This could be your homepage, a specific product page, a service landing page, or a contact form. For this example, let's say we're promoting a company that sells handmade furniture, and the link will go to the main product page:

https://www.yourcoolfurniture.com/products

Step 2: Build Your UTM Link with Google's Campaign URL Builder

You don't have to build your UTM link manually. Google provides a free and easy-to-use tool called the Campaign URL Builder. Open it up and fill in the fields based on your ad.

Using our furniture example, here’s how we'd fill it out:

• Website URL: https://www.yourcoolfurniture.com/products
• campaign_source: craigslist
• campaign_medium: cpc
• campaign_name: walnut_coffee_tables_q4

As you fill in the fields, the tool will automatically generate your fully-tagged URL. It will look something like this:

https://www.yourcoolfurniture.com/products?utm_source=craigslist&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=walnut_coffee_tables_q4

This long link contains all the information Google Analytics needs. Once someone clicks it, your work is done - GA takes care of the rest.

Step 3: Place the Trackable Link in Your Craigslist Ad

Now, copy the entire generated URL from the builder tool. When you're creating your Craigslist post, paste this link directly into the "posting body" section.

A Pro-Tip for Better Clicks: That long URL with all the UTM tags can look a bit messy. Additionally, Craigslist has been known to sometimes strip tracking parameters from links. To solve both issues, it’s a great idea to use a free URL shortening service like Bitly.

Just paste your long UTM URL into Bitly, and it will give you a clean, short link like bit.ly/A4bCDE. This link looks much cleaner in your ad, and when a user clicks it, Bitly will redirect them through the full UTM-tagged URL, ensuring your tracking data is preserved.

Step 4: Find Your Craigslist Data in Google Analytics

After a day or two, it’s time to see your data. Where you find it depends on which version of Google Analytics you're using.

For Google Analytics 4:

GA4 is the current standard, and luckily, finding your campaign data is easy.

1. Log into your GA4 property.
2. On the left-hand navigation, go to Reports > Acquisition > Traffic acquisition.
3. The default report shows traffic grouped by Session default channel group. To see your UTM-tagged traffic, click the dropdown arrow next to that primary dimension and select Session source / medium.
4. You'll now see a table of all your traffic sources. Look for the row that says craigslist / cpc. That’s your ad traffic!

From here, you can analyze everything - how many users came from that source, how long they stayed on your site (average engagement time), and, most importantly, how many conversions they generated.

For Universal Analytics (UA):

If you're still working with data in the older Universal Analytics, the process is just as simple.

1. Log into your Universal Analytics property.
2. On the left-hand navigation, go to Acquisition > All Traffic > Source/Medium.
3. In the traffic table, look for the row where Source / Medium is listed as craigslist / cpc.

By clicking on craigslist / cpc, you can drill down further to see visitor behavior, goal completions, and more. If you added a Campaign tag to your URL, you can click on the Campaign dimension in the Acquisition menu to see a breakdown of how each specific ad is performing.

Going Beyond Clicks: Tracking Conversions from Craigslist

Seeing website visitors is great, but knowing they took a valuable action is even better. The real power of this method is connecting your Craigslist ads to tangible business outcomes. Make sure you have conversion tracking set up in Google Analytics for important user actions like:

• Submitting a contact form.
• Signing up for a newsletter.
• Making a purchase.
• Downloading a brochure.

Once you have conversions set up (in GA4, you do this under Admin > Data display > Events, where you can mark an event as a "conversion"), your Traffic acquisition report will show you not just how many people visited from your Craigslist ad, but how many of them actually converted. Now you can finally calculate a real return on investment (ROI) for your Craigslist spending and double down on the ads that are actually driving results. You can confidently answer questions like, "My Walnut Coffee Tables ad drove 150 clicks and 3 sales inquiries, while the Pine Bookshelf ad drove 200 clicks and zero inquiries." That’s an insight you can act on.

Final Thoughts

By using the simple combination of UTM parameters and Google Analytics, you can transform Craigslist from a marketing mystery into a measurable, optimizable channel. This process puts the power of data back in your hands, allowing you to move beyond guesswork and start making marketing decisions based on clear performance metrics.

At Graphed, we know that bringing all your marketing data together is a constant challenge. You're trying to prove a Craigslist campaign's ROI in one tab while checking your ad performance in Facebook Ads Manager and your sales figures in Shopify. Instead of spending hours jumping between platforms to connect the dots, we built Graphed to do it for you. You can connect all your data sources, then use simple, natural language to ask questions like, "Which of my channels drove the most sales inquiries last month?" and get clear, real-time dashboards in seconds.