What's your policy on leaving sold units advertised online?

[jemwigs]

Hi

I am interested to know what policies dealers have for removing sold units from online advertising.

It seems that some dealers are prone to leaving sold units online until they are delivered with the aim of attracting further leads which they can then work with to move the customers to similar cars. Although this may provide some additional sales it also has the effect of diluting the lead conversion rates by having a number of leads for vehicles that cannot be sold in the usual manner..

Other dealers are of the opinion that having a customer respond to an online ad for a car already sold leads to customer dissatisfaction and promotes a lack of transparency and seeds customer mistrust. These dealers remove all sold cars right away.

Has anyone done specific research on this and what are your policies regarding the sold units?

 

[Karen Ann]

No research or real tracking done.
Our sales team gets frustrated when they get leads for sold units. Our policy is sold units come off the site right away and then all the feeds get updated overnight.

 

[craigh]

Our policy is to keep sold vehicles online forever.

• We ditch all the photos except a compressed version of the first one.
• We track a view as a special Sold Unit view
• We tracking entrances to these pages in a report
• We remove them from the inventory listing page
• We remove the lead buttons, comments and price
• We promote the related vehicles higher on the page

Most sites get at least 50 legitimate visitors a month on sold units (legitimacy measured by showing further intent after landing on the page) and some get significantly more if their SEO is good. I use them to acquire more visitors, maintain rank with Google (those pages don't suddenly 404) and to make sure that links that are shared never "die".

This functionality was born out of seeing constant 404 results on our Dealer.com site on inventory pages. Seemed like such a waste.

Last year we added a threshold so that for a particular period of time (typically 10 days) the vehicle can show as Sold in the VLP before being hidden.

 

[BHavican]

My two cents: I'd rather the cars don't come off until the sale is final. I don't want to exclude opportunities if the deal falls through. High lead conversion stats is a nice feather in my cap but sold cars matters more. Most prospects are understanding if car is unavailable as long as I'm upfront about it.

 

[jemwigs]

Interesting points, thanks. @craigh Your policy although very sensibly and smart also seems very involved....are you achieving this by creating additional pages in your DSS site based on the VDP content? I assume you can't achieve this by leaving them in inventory listings which are overwritten by syndicated feeds.

 

[craigh]

Interesting points, thanks. @craigh Your policy although very sensibly and smart also seems very involved....are you achieving this by creating additional pages in your DSS site based on the VDP content? I assume you can't achieve this by leaving them in inventory listings which are overwritten by syndicated feeds.

No more DSS sites, full custom platform. Only thing dealer has to do is configure the thresholds for keeping photos, sold vehicles, etc.
I actually left the dealership world to work for a website vendor due to my constant frustrations with dealership websites.
Now I get to actually put my ideas into the product and see them get used by a myriad of dealers

 

[Tallcool1]

We leave them up until the sale if funded.

@craigh , your process is very interesting. If I am understanding correctly, the vehicle is clearly represented as being sold. I can see significant benefit if the customer clicks. This could be really cool if I could figure out how to put a great big button that says CLICK HERE TO SEE CURRENT INVENTORY...or something like that. Neat idea.

Clint

 

[craigh]

Dealers make most of the choices @Tallcool1 - lets them control how it looks and feels.

 

[craigh]

(Ignore the amazing Hyundai stock photos from Chrome Data...)

 

[Harry Kasparian]

Frustration within the BDC, the floor, and most importantly, your customers. (Especially the 90% who do NOT share their personal data before stepping into your dealer).

I however agree with @BHavican , keep them on until delivery.