VDP: Cause or Effect?

[skutchhenks]

First thanks to everyone on the forum here, and the leaders who started and continue supporting it. What a huge resource!

Over the years I've heard the term VDP start from the reporting end mostly associated with classified sites justifying the need for dealers to spend more or at minimum maintain, too now where it's the holy grail of overall dealership sales performance and closely monitored.

I'm currently working on trying to measure the level of effectiveness needed for several dealers using Autotrader and Cars, one path suggested is figuring out the cost per VDP for the given inventory of used cars only for now. I hit a roadblock though, I have a VDP cost range of .70 to $1.65 per view on a range of stores based on sales performance and inventory size. The stores package levels range from the lowest to highest per their markets. The stores with lower cost per VDP are using vAuto to price their inventory and have many views across the whole USA, I would like to separate the views per a GEO radius, like 100 miles, but can't with the current reporting in the either vendors system. The stores on the lowest package have much higher cost per VDP, surprisingly most do not have vAuto or any pricing system. All stores merchandise their inventory well, great photos, some with real videos, competitive market pricing, etc.

So how do I get a cost per VDP based on a given the GEO area?

I believe the VDP definition/meaning and performance is a result of many factors, most of those reflect how the inventory is merchandised, coupled with the level of exposure with shoppers in a given market area. However I believe more VDP views doesn't always mean you will sell more cars, but I'm up against the thinking majority here with the stores UCM's, mainly the ones using vAuto. My question to them has been so you're selling those people who are looking at your vehicles from 1,000 miles away? Blank stare. Granted stores do sell some cars each month from several hundred miles away, but it's nothing you could build your business around.

What are your thoughts on the term VDP? Is it overused and misunderstood? Or exactly as described?

 

[craigh]

The term VDP means "Vehicle Display Page". It's just a reference to a page with vehicle details on it.

I think that may have been confused a bit in your post. VDP != VDP View.

Aside from that, I sort of understand what you're trying to track here and it's an age old battle.
Most people try and calculate some sort of cost per lead instead of cost per view, since views can be useless, robots, misclicks, uninterested customers, scroll-bys, etc.

As far as geo distance goes, that's a correlation data we've tried to run many times. We try and correlate a sale in a specific region (outside our usual area) with a spike in traffic from that area as well - doesn't always work. We've also had customers from a specific area buy a car, say they saw us on AutoTrader and then we check the AutoTrader reports and they claim we've had no visitors from that area.

Geo-tracking is not as good as they may have you believe it is and I think you should re-evaluate what you're trying to track here.
Unless I'm just confused.

 

[joe.pistell]

... My question to them has been so you're selling those people who are looking at your vehicles from 1,000 miles away? Blank stare. Granted stores do sell some cars each month from several hundred miles away, but it's nothing you could build your business around.

What are your thoughts on the term VDP? Is it overused and misunderstood? Or exactly as described?

Cost per VDP view is valid. Trying to GEO limit it is logical, but, won't help your cause.

A data driven dealer (using vauto/AAX/RedBumper), that knows cars and understands vehicle scarcity, can easily sell cars up to a days drive away (300 miles or more) Read this, you'll get it: Top 10 "Scarciest" Cars on AutoTrader.com - AutoTrader.com

Vice-versa, a non-data driven dealer that sells 2 yr old rentals (i.e Chevy Malibus) is going to have few VDP views and they'll be from a small radius (i.e. excess supply and it's a vehicle that has has low shopper curiosity)

Price per VDP viewed is a point of measurement that reflects the dealers profile, their inventory profile, their distance from major markets, the package they're on and more. IMO, when comparing across dealership roofs, I'd keep this a high-level observation. It has great value looking at a single stores numbers, MoM and YoY.

Just my $0.02

 

[Chris Cachor]

What are your thoughts on the term VDP? Is it overused and misunderstood? Or exactly as described?

It's just an acronym. Typically eCommerce sites and online applications refer to this as master/detail pages or list view/detail pages. In terms of measuring ROI, I'm not qualified to answer that! However, if there's any metric I really care about, it's VDP views to VDP conversions. That will usually tell you how well you're doing at creating a marketing "interaction", which to me is the goal of these pages.

 

[joe.pistell]

Chris,
divide VDP views by total spend. That will give you cost per VDP viewed.

 

[skutchhenks]

@Craig thanks for clarifying, I've heard the VDP acronym thrown around so much lately I just naturally assume it everyone should know I'm referring to views, but yes I do know it's a acronym for the vehicle detail page of any given website.

@Joe very good point, the dealers that price per market and utilize that method are also very well run to begin with. I agree as usual with your feedback, and will explain where I'm going with this below.

From what I've compared to the website analytics and any vendors reporting, the VDP views are skewed from the vendors side. Here's why mainly; there is no area range variable - like a GEO radius filter, no IP exclusion filter - important because some sites have many dealers comparing market prices which access the VDP not to mention sales personnel traffic views. Those two factors are very important if you're trying to determine a cost per VDP for new or used vehicles for shoppers only, especially if you're trying to measure the inventory exposure value per package costs for new or used vehicle inventory per dealer, per market area. Quite simply you cannot, the level of transparency is not there, but there are other ways.

The more I look at this, I believe we should have a inventory presence on AT and Cars for new and used cars. What I'm questioning now is the package level of spending on both new and used cars per dealer as it relates to incremental profit.

For the dealerships I'm looking at the range of spend is over $16k and the lowest $2k per month on AT. On Cars between $6k and $2k per month. I thought the cost per VDP view would give me some insight into more package feature, more money = more traffic, more sales, but it does not. There is no correlation. The dealers with lower priced packages sell as many from AT and Cars as the dealers with the highest priced packages per ratio compared to their inventory size.

From what I know about the packaging on Cars there's no real advantage do do anything but the lowest package for new and used cars. For AT it seems the packages and pricing is much more complex, maybe by design because most UCM's couldn't explain the differences. On AT the advantage to spending more is a position increase in the standard & sorted vehicle listing rankings. For new cars with a popular brand this can be advantageous do to the size and similarity of new cars per market area. For used cars it does seem advantageous to boost sales on the surface, but I would argue the increase in exposure and sales profit would not prove to be a fair return.

However I've been told that shoppers search on AT differently by selecting a 75 mile radius and not sorting or searching by price, so we have to pay the higher package cost to be seen at all by shoppers. Now that's ludicrous to me, on every other auto shopping site and even dealers websites the average time on site of a tracked verified buyer is over 15 minutes per VDP views. Shoppers spend many hours looking for cars online, they pick a price/payment range and start looking for matches they like, sorting, searching and going to many sites trying to find best values closest to them. So dealers with the lowest package prices on used inventory are getting good exposure for their inventory on AT and by far getting a better return on their money spent than the dealers spending much more in package cost per month.

What I'm discovering is that the dealership's monthly sales results are more defined by the inventory size, people & processes, vehicle merchandising and overall exposure of the inventory to be found online by a shopper in their market area. That's comparing same time months, not January to August. The dealers that spread their money around with more viable ad sites for their inventory to touch more shoppers per their market area, are also much more profitable.

I will also be looking at many more sources too, these were some of the largest in the monthly budgets though. Thanks in advance for your feedback.

 

[craigh]

Chris,
divide VDP views by total spend. That will give you cost per VDP viewed.

Would be nice if all providers had Google Goals so we could see more than that.
A VDP view could be so many different things, I would just love to be able to qualify them more.

- did the visitor enlarge the photos
- did they use the payments calculator
- did they click to open the leads form (surprising number of people click the button and don't submit the form)
- did they scroll past X
- how long were they on the page

etc etc

I know way too many companies that use bots to track classifieds sites and contribute as many as 10 views per day per vehicle.
We've run some tests to see if they show up in the reporting and with every provider we looked at they get tracked as views.
Just starts to turn VDP view counts into far less valuable data if I can't determine which % are bogus.

 

[skutchhenks]

I know way too many companies that use bots to track classifieds sites and contribute as many as 10 views per day per vehicle.
We've run some tests to see if they show up in the reporting and with every provider we looked at they get tracked as views.
Just starts to turn VDP view counts into far less valuable data if I can't determine which % are bogus.

This is exactly what I'm seeing as well Craig, the reason I'm not so keen now on VDP views or the cost metrics for these classified sites.

I do believe many vendors could be more forthcoming with their analytics, but there is no real business benefit for them to tell dealers you don't have to spend exorbitant amounts of money to have your inventory seen by shoppers. The fear of loss is too great in the automotive business though, we are our own worst enemy.

 

[craigh]

I do believe many vendors could be more forthcoming with their analytics, but there is no real business benefit for them to tell dealers you don't have to spend exorbitant amounts of money to have your inventory seen by shoppers. The fear of loss is too great in the automotive business though, we are our own worst enemy.

Absolutely agree, but a guy can dream!

 

[ed.brooks]

I applaud your seeking more advanced analytics to help fuel the best possible decisions regarding your marketing. Analyzing VDP performance is combination of many factors:

...performance is a result of many factors, most of those reflect how the inventory is merchandised, coupled with the level of exposure with shoppers in a given market area.

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