I'm aware of that. That is why compete or alexa only show 5-6 million for ATC. When you add in all of the partner sites...you get 16 million.

SCRAPER: (skrey-per) Noun

A program designed to take site content without permission. It catalogs and indexes the World Wide Web without following an industry standard protocol. Seeks to disguise itself and ignore the ROBOT.TXT file for instructions. At ATC, scrapers are eliminated from site metrics when we are able to identify them. Just like Cars.com .

If you would like me to explain what spiders are and how they work...let me know.

Bottom line...ATC had 16 million unique visitors and Cars.com had 10 million. Great numbers for both sites and I hope you are on both. You keep masquerading as a dealer...if you were a dealer and you are this bitter...cancel ATC!

Koolaid,

So traffic numbers from partner websites are never counted in total site traffic? Compete and Alexa are reporting organic searches. They do not combine traffic from organic searches and searches from partner sites to get the number of total searches.

You are so confused. Here is your educational research. Read this and if you still don't get it.... incredible.

You still don't get it. Cars.com, ATC, etc., are all held to the same reporting standards as determined by the IAB. Therefore cars.com and ATC report numbers based on the same type of activity. Do some educational research on the subject and get back to me.

Koolaid,

Why is it that my AT rep is now saying that AT had 16 million uniques on the site in March 2009? Why does AT continue to allow Spiders and Bots to inflate their traffic numbers? Is this to continue to deceive the car dealers?

Give us a break. The Dealer Center of AT used to have a disclaimer about the Spiders and Bots. Now they just have the asterisk without the explanation.

The deception continues.... a lot like the traffic numbers on the dealer center that mysteriously went away when they no longer were the Yahoo Autos partner site.

Geoff,

I just want to make sure that I understood your comment correctly. You canceled AT because your CRM tool showed 20 phone calls even though your salespeople, the ones that engage your customers, credit the site with 20 sales per month? Did I misunderstand something here, or did you?
I have a few follow up questions about no loss of sales:
How long ago did you cancel? How many monthly visitors on your site while using AT, how many after? How about floor traffic? How about calls to your dealership that weren't routed through a tracking number? Has enough time passed in a 90-120 day buying cycle market to really know if AT was returning on the investment?

Point is that figuring cost per lead on phone calls only is the 1990's of web marketing. Both the big players and edmunds recently completed independent studies on consumer behavior that highlight a noticeable shift away from phone and email submission. Respectfully, if that is all you are looking at you need to hold your other advertising to the same standards. If you can't draw a straight line between the source and the sale cut away, goodbye newspaper, goodbye billboards, goodbye radio, goodbye charity events, goodbye demos, heck if you really suck at tracking your sales, goodbye website. Are you ready to sit back and really rely on your walk-in traffic?

The internet has ushered in a new era of consumer behavior. There will be less straight lines between your marketing efforts and a sale. You need to be prepared to intelligently consider the strongest influencers of your sales as part of a viable mix. I'm not writing a blank check for AT here, but I am saying that you can't patently throw out web transfers as junk reporting.

There has to be an introduction before there can be a consummation. Are you sure enough to wager all of your website sales that AT had "nothing" to do with getting those buyers to your site?

FYI...Yahoo Autos only contributes an average of 800,000 uniques. Maybe a little more but not much.

Typo...I meant were not truthful?

You still didn't answer the question where you came up with 3x increase. Is that because you truthful?

Oh, and by the way -- ATC doesn't "control" any inventory -- the dealers do.

Kool-aid,

Obviously, based on your comments you do not know how the Comscore data is generated. You are exactly the problem with AT -- you think you know everything and the dealers know nothing. Too bad.

You think the KBB trade for Yahoo was "brilliant"? I rest my case.

I forgot to mention...Most consnumers appraise their trade or research at KBB.com, Edmunds.com, or NADA.com before they go into the dealership. ATC controls the inventory for all 3 sites! Good luck!

John B...Let's see...Cars.com averaged 8 million unique visitors per month in 2007. Leap forward to 2009 and according to the latest reports by commscore. Cars.com is down over 2008. However, Cars.com is around 10 million uniques per month. Where does the 3X increase come in? ATC on the other hand, had 14 million unique visitors in Feb 2007. Feb 2009 ATC had 15.8 million unique visitors. All ATC did in Dec 2007 was trade yahoo for KBB.com. It looks brilliant now doesn't it? BTW...I won't mention any names, but ATC's head honcho was at a conference with Cars.com's head honcho a couple of months ago and you know what Cars.com's guy said? I quote "We are 5 years behind you guys"! In the internet world, 5 years is an eternity.

Jim,

I liked your comments however Cars.com is not a "distant second" in reality. Here's why...

AT likes to use traffic sites like Alexa.com and Compete.com to compare themselves to Cars.com. These sites only count "organic searches" (the consumer typed in a specific internet site on their browser). It does not take into account Site Traffic as a result of Cars.com (and AT for that matter's) site Partnerships.

Cars.com Partnered to provide dealer inventories to Yahoo in December 2007. Since then, the site traffic has more than almost tripled. The growth is not just because of Yahoo, but Yahoo grew it significantly.

Do you ever wonder why you can not see your history data on AT's Dealer Center prior to January 1, 2008? (They must not want you to be able to compare what happened after they lost Yahoo to Cars.com.) What a crock!

Mike,

Keep spewing that nonsense about "a limited number of Partnerships available in a DMA". You drank the Kool-aid.

A District Manager can (and will) approve any number of AT Partnerships in a given DMA. True, there are a set number of guidelines per make, but the District Manager does not need to follow them. Also, AT will zone out a DMA (by Zip Code) in some DMAs. This means that a dealer, although they are paying Premium, may not have all the zip codes in their own DMA. And don't get me started on the Conquest package that allows dealers in other DMAs to buy into your DMA!

The truth is that if the dealers stopped paying for the Premium space, they would still all be on the site. The ones that are still paying for Premium (foolishly) are competing against themselves when the other dealers in their make figure this out.

Save the money and you will do as well in the Featured section of AT. If you see worse results (I doubt it), AT will always take more money from you if you decide to go back to Premium listings.

Before you guys spend big money with ATC or Cars.com, make sure you are tracking the ACTUAL independent leads generated from these guys and DO NOT RELY on the reports that they send you with crap like web clicks, etc.

I saved my dealership $5000/mth because my salespeople were telling me we had sold 20 vehicles off of ATC that month, but my call tracking only registered 20 calls MTD -- off of a 5000 spend! That averaged to $250 per car lead??? Anyway, I cancelled right away, and have noticed no drop in my units sold through.

Like it or not, it's the age of the internet. And from the venom spilled here by a some crying sour grapes because the price they paid ten years ago to be on ATC was one tenth what they probably pay for ATC today. Yet the amount of unique buyers that visit ATC monthly are 10 times what they were back in the day.
ATC is the big dog on the block, with Cars.com at a distant second, yet a formidable foe. So if your angst is about the price of the top level, don't buy it. Thats why there is a middle level. After working in newspapers for years, the dealers would moan about the price of a full page ad and would buy a quarter page instead. Did they sell as many cars? Probably not, but they usually sold enough to easily pay for the ad.

So if you compare ATC to buying cheaper plastic spoons, maybe your customers can only afford cheaper spoons and its time to expand your customer base to include those that can afford the better quality spoon. If you dislike a company because of bad experiences in the past, you should be elated that an internet giant like ATC is reaching out to it's customer base and it's lost customers that have left them to try to right the ship. If your venom for ATC is so strong that you would never give them a second chance, you should at least consider Cars.com.
People were angry at the newspapers because there was always somebody else buying the full page ads that they couldn't afford, or wouldn't. Some people here have a hate for ATC because other dealers pay the price for a service that works for them and the sales generated by ATC justifies their cost.

John B
The bottom line is why is there a Premium section? Because dealers asked for it. How many times do you think a dealer has said; or asked for his cars to be on top? If you were talking radio or television; it's how can I get my spots in prime time? Newspaper; how can I get the front cover; back cover; right hand page? The answer is always the same; you pay a premium for it. That's just business! The market drives the price.

As to the fact that there is a limited number of front or back pages in newspaper; limited prime time spots in electronic media; well ATC limits the number of Premium partners in any specific make. A GM partnership won't be sold to unlimited GM dealers in a market. There are only a few partnerships available per make in each DMA.

Mike,

Your comparison to newspaper placement is exactly the problem with AT. AT is an internet site trying structure itself like a newspaper.

Dealers and Consumers are not served by the tiered structure and Pricing on the Autotrader site... only Autotrader.

AT has convinced dealers that there truly is value to being in the top spot. The problem is that ANYONE can be in the top spot. As time goes on, the value is even more degraded as more and more dealers in particular market take the bait.

In these lean times, dealers all over are starting to realize this and cutting their AT spend to the "Featured" position on the site. AT's lack of high trafficked partner sites is degrading their impact on the dealer's bottom line. The latest push on the New Car side is showing their desperation to retain income.

Your newspaper analogy is flawed. What you fail to realize, is that there is ONLY ONE front and back of a newspaper for advertising purposes. There is no such limitation on a Website.

I am not saying do not advertise on Autotrader. I am suggesting that the "Emperor" has a lot less Clothes on than he used to!

meant to say above “...in order to
pre-prepare IN ADVANCE and utilise forward planning… ”

At the end of the day, there's a paradigm shift of the strategic staircase; to reverse wrongsiding the demographic by leveraging talents and display and inspire unyielding integrity thru living the values and a reduction in workforce.
Strategic intiatives focus on the next level drill-down to granularity, cascading down new information to staff and feeding it back to our stakeholders, who must come to the party or be left out. And also in addition, to aggregate bandwidth at the close of play by actioning ROI, since we'd better not let the grass grow too long on this one unless we've captured the low-hanging fruit. By capturing and employing 360-degree thinking we are still optimistic things will feed through the sales and delivery pipeline, in order to
pre-prepare and utilise forward planning and ensure the balance sheet by sprinkling our magic throughout the enterprise. We need a holistic, cradle-to-grave approach and, as product evangelists, loop back to our clients
and touch base, and exchange idea-showers offline. From the get-go, we must... we shall... let us now... go forward together in this space.

As to the selling of positioning on ATC. All media does it. Radio and Television charge more for prime time spots. The newspaper gives the back or front page of the section to the biggest contract. Google and Yahoo charge more to be listed first. It's like Reale estate; it's all about location; location; location.

... meant to say above "This is why you really DON'T see your AT rep until cancellation time"...

As a former AT employee, it is not surprising that you did not get the service you needed after the sale at AT. It was never the focus of management.

AT's business model is flawed and is not customer(dealer)centered. I realized this early in my stint there and it sickened me. Look at the Tiered Structure of the site. (Premium, Featured, Standard.) It is all about squeezing more out of the dealers. The "new car" suite is absolutely ludicrous.

Yes, print (especially) is slowly dying (look at the reported bankruptcies in the Newspaper industry). Okay. Just because you have spent $40K a month on print in the past doesn't mean you have to spend that much forever. Your margins are shrinking and so should your entire ad spend to compensate. The internet the current solution to this problem.

In early 2007, AT took away the bonus paid on the rep's book of business. Reps at AT are paid to sell new contracts. And penalized 100% if you cancel. This is why you really see your rep until cancellation time.

AT seems to be trying to change the course of their corporate culture, but this is a big ship to turn around.

Unfortunately, at AT there are a lot of people in place in management that have always used weekly quotas and fear tactics (getting "written up") to motivate the sales people. Many people under this kind of pressure from their company do not have the strength to think about anyone but themselves. You, the Dealer customers have been on the short end of that deal for a LONG time.

Wow; as a new ATC Ad consultant; all this pent up venom really surprised me. I've been with ATC since June 08. Prior to that it was five years with the Big daily Newspaper selling auto dealers; where we raised rates 7% every year.I had at least three dealers spending close to $1 million per year with me. I could see and hear the changing advertising environment; where these dealers were all headed towards the internet. In fact; it was some of my larger dealers that suggested I should try and get a job with ATC; as they found it gave them the best bang for their buck. As a competitive vendor I thought that ATC and cars.com were ridiculously cheap; as my average account spent $40k per month with me at the newspaper.

Before that I sold the top Adults 25-54 radio station in Silicon Valley to auto dealers. That too wasn't perfect; as often my dealers would get several of their prime time spots bumped off the air for higher rate spots; even though the dealer had an annual contract.
The average spend here was $15,000 per month.

I think the pricing of ATC or any rate increases are not really the issue. The issue is that you weren't getting enough service for your investment. I can assure you that ATC is working to correct that. All the sales people now receive about 50% of their commisions based on service metrics. If you haven't done the things to make the dealer successful; you don't get paid.

I would have to say; of all the media I have worked for ATC is the most customer focused and it shows in the dealer retention. So; please forgive us for any mistakes we've made. We are working to get better.

Soon, when it's too late, you'll see what I'm talking about. I'll let all of you find out for yourselves. For years, no one at the SEC wanted to listen to Harry Markopolis when he warned them about Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme. David Metter was "encouraged" to post here.