Cars are driving the Kijiji community

BMW IS THE MOST POPULAR and searched for automotive brand on Kijiji. But more surprising, it’s also the most searched item overall in all categories and has been for the last three years.

Cars are taking over Kijiji, and this trend does not seem to be slowing down.

To celebrate its 10th anniversary, Kijiji set out to research some of the behavioural trends on its website and learn more about its users.

With four million unique monthly visitors who use the classifieds for automotive alone, Kijiji has been able to gain a lot of data in that category. The company created an infographic which captured its results over the last 10 years, including automotive data.

Automotive has fared particularly well on Kijiji over the past decade, with ads on the site growing from around 15,000 in 2005 to more than one million ads in 2014. Some of that growth has been fuelled by dealerships, with around 4,500 of them listing ads on Kijiji today.

“Kijiji has become a great place not only to buy your car or sell your car but also to gauge the market value,” says Shawn McIntyre, Community Relations Manager for Kijiji, adding Canadian consumers have access to a large inventory available on Kijiji and at their fingertips on mobile devices.

And by offering dealers reasonable rates to post a large amount of inventory on Kijiji, dealerships are gravitating towards the site and are including it as part of their marketing packages, says McIntyre.

At its inception, McIntyre says Kijiji never focused on dealers and didn’t realize how much of an impact dealers would make on the car market in Canada. But that’s now changed based on feedback from the community and from dealers themselves.

“Car dealers see value on posting to Kijiji,” he says, seeing a spike in dealers when the site enhanced the online experience with new features that appealed specifically to dealers.

If dealers want to be successful on the classifieds, then McIntyre says being witty can be the way to go.

“They want to set themselves apart from the others so they really put wit into the description of the ads,” says McIntyre, adding wit has worked especially well for users who are posting descriptions for vehicles that are not out of the ordinary.

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