Why You Should Advertise on Kijiji
Advertising your business on the digital classified marketplace provides you with a constant stream of new clients. Whether it is a product or service you wish to post an ad for, Kijiji is one of the top choices for selling digital classifieds in Canada. Kijiji offers sellers free traffic on their website, good keyword searchability and excellent customer support.
How Can I Advertise on Kijiji
You can post your ad as free or feature listing in one or many of the Kijiji categories. The paid features are an additional cost. Unlike newspaper classifieds, your potential buyers will search for keywords in your ad and see your ad among other ads with the exact keywords. Kijiji offers paid features for sellers that boost your ads’ visibility in Canada.
How Do I Sell My Ad on Kijiji?
If you sell your sеrvice or product on Kijiji website, you need to make sure that users search and engage with your ads. The general rule is that you should post an ad, and it must be on the first page to get more calls and replies.
With a complete walkthrough in this article, you will understand how to create selling ad content and post Kijiji ads to increase their visibility so more people will see it.
Step #1: Research Your Competition to See What Work For Them
First, you must find what already works in your niche for other businesses and learn what they do to attract customers. You will save a lot of time and effort if you find a few listings that advertise similar service or product and use them as your baseline.
How to Research Your Competition
The first thing you can do is open the Kijiji home screen and search for ads similar to yours (Sеrvice, Product, Rental Property, Job Category etc.). You should try to narrow it down to free ads and avoid searching for paid advertising for now. It will take you only a few minutes to find similar ads.
Create a List of Keywords for Your Ads
Once you have found the ads, you will start to collect the keywords from their ads. The keywords are typically located in the ad’s title, in the body of the ad or at the bottom of the ad. Look for the list of services or product features listed in the ad. It is a good starting point to start building your keyword lists.
Check If Google Ranks Your Keywords from Kijiji
You can search for the keywords you collected on Google to see if they are ranking. Because when you include these keywords in your Kijiji ads, the traffic from Google will be able to reach them. You can read our article on Keyword Optimization to learn more about it.
Step #2: Create Titles that Attract Customers and Rank on Google
Whether you like it or not, it is always about doing things better than the competition. Especially if you are using highly competitive keywords, you need to stand out even more on Kijiji. Ad titles and your ad description are the key elements to consider in writing the ad wanted by potential buyer on Kijiji.
What should I write in my ads’ titles?
Your ad titles must have keywords for which your customers will search. Ensure that you have your main keyword in all titles. You can also add your phone number to the titles. Also, emojis contribute to great attention grabbing title so use them to make your ad stand out on Kijiji.
Add More than One Keyword
You MUST have main keywords included in your ad title so your ads appear in specific keyword searches. But you are not limited to one keyword only. You can add more than one. It is essential to use exact keyword phrases displayed in the searches on Kijiji.
Include Your Phone Number
A phone number in the titles allows customers to call you right away. I always suggest our clients insert the contact number in the title when you posted an ad. If you do not have space in the title, add the phone number in the first two lines of your ad description.
Step #3: Creating Converting and Searchable Ad Description
Your ad description serves multiple purposes, from creating a lasting impression and describing your sеrvice or product to ranking your ad on Kijiji searches. Your customers will be distracted by dozens of ads, and you need to make sure that your ad is visually appealing.
High-Quality Images Get You Noticed
Your ad must use an attractive and clean image to stand out before browsing customers. The main picture of your ad may determine if you get a call from the customer or not. Note you can upload a video from Youtube. We recommend uploading only professionally mastered video.
Besides main images, you can upload up to 10 images of your sеrvice or product for each ad. Make sure that you use high-quality images that show the best version of what you do.
We see most people upload photo directly from the phone’s gallery, which is not what we mean by high-quality images. We suggest you carefully select a few photo with different angles and process them with your phone’s automatic image correction before you post your ad’s photo.
How Much Text Should I Write?
Your ad should be easy to read. You should avoid lengthy and bulky text as most customers do not have time to read it. Too little text may lack clarity and assurance that you do what they are looking for. Follow the advice below to post an ad with a winning copy.
Start Your Ad with an Inline List of Keywords
You can add an inline list of keywords to the beginning (first four lines) of your ad description to rank in more searches. This tactic alone will multiply your visibility by 10x. We will have an article on the keyword headings alone soon.
Use a List Format for Each Service or Product Specs
We recommend using lists over paragraphs when listing your sеrvice or product specs. Stay away from long paragraphs and bulky text without paragraph breaks. Use bullet points for lists and ensure that list the most appealing services or product specs on the list first.
Create Confidence with Assurance Section
You should provide reassurance information before asking the customer for action. We insert the assurance section after the sеrvice lists and before the call to action sections.
The assurance section usually talks about warranties, insurances, or any commitment your company is ready to provide the customer to take them happily. Ensure that you do not oversell and give an honest description of what you do.
Your Call to Action Must Be Easy
Your ad should have multiple Call to Action sections, but at least one at the end of the ad. The call to action can vary depending on what you offer your potential buyer.
Generally, always include your phone number and ask them to call or text you.
Stay away from complicated calls to action like “send us a mechanical drawing to info@xyz.com.”
Target Your Customers with Postal Codes
If you want to target customers in a specific area, you can use the postal code in your ad.
Kijiji will show your ad first to the customers nearby, and the customers are likely to click on the ad that is closer to them.
Do NOT Include Email Addresses
We advise our customers not to include their email in the ads for two reasons.
First, most customers won’t email you – they will reply directly or call you.
Second, you will start to get a lot of spam from automated bots on your email. Just don’t do it.
Step #4: Posting ads in the Right Place at Right Time
You will start getting immediate responses if you post an ad on Kijiji in the relevant category and location at high-traffic times of the day. Some categories are meant for only items, while others are for only services.
Let’s dive in and see why category, location and posting times are essential.
Post Ad in Category with High Searches
When looking for the category for your ad type, first, look at the competition. You may see that not all ads in your search are from the same category.
If you search for keywords of a particular item on Google and click on Kijiji results, you will find that most of Kijijipages are showing results from ALL categories. For example, you can post a kitchen ad in Home Renovation Materials or Home Indoor category.
If your business produces a tangible product, like a kitchen or kitchen countertop, you can post your ad in Buy & Sell and not in the Servies section.
It is essential to post ad on Kijiji in the correct category and relevant details to avoid troubles with Kijiji system. But generally, if you sell a product and provide installation, then you can use Buy and Sell or Sеrvice category. If you have questions about ad type and categories, contact us.
Post Ads in Multiple Locations
You can post the same ad in multiple locations on Kijiji website as long as your business can service that area.
We recommend using the location from Kijiji lists and adding postal codes to target customers in specific areas.
The customers usually see ads near them or 25 km from their location, so posting your ads in areas with a higher population density is crucial.
The Greater Toronto Area, for example, has five sub-locations on Kijiji: the City of Toronto, Mississauga (Peel), Oshawa (Durham), Oakville (Halton) and Markham (York).
Generally, if you are posting an ad in the City of Toronto, customers from nearby sub-locations will see your ads.
Suppose you are posting your ads in a postal code from a location in Etobicoke. Customers from Mississauga, Oakville and Markham, are likely to see it. That’s why using postal codes in your ads is so much fun.
Post Ads at High Traffic Times
We advise posting your listings when the highest number of users are on Kijiji.
The best high-traffic times for posting are usually in the morning (8 am-10 am), lunchtime (12:30 pm-1:30 pm), and evening (6 pm-9 pm).
But it depends on your customer’s availability and when they have time to search your new ad. You can read more on finding perfect posting times for your ads.
Final Thoughts
You can see that getting results from your Kijiji ads requires keyword research and optimization, an organized and attractive ad description and precise posting location and timing. We hope this article was helpful and hope you have found what you were looking for.
We can guarantee that by posting new ad with our recommendations, your free or paid ads will gain excellent searchability on Kijiji and will start to generate new leads from day one while saving your money and time.
If you feel like you need us to help you posting your Kijiji ads in Canada, our dedicated team of experts will be able to create, optimize or post your ads on Kijiji to save your time and money further.