Using something other than Cobalt as a GM dealer

[Matt Ramsey]

Just moved over to our General Motors stores. Has anyone had experience switching from Cobalt and using some other vendor for their website and getting away from Cobalt with SEO and SEM?

Was it a good thing? What were the repercussions from leaving Cobalt?

 

[Alex.Lemoing]

Hello Matt, our dealership had been using Cobalt "CDK" SEM services for a long time, when I came on board with the dealership I looked at the numbers and decided to opted out of the SEM service from Cobalt because they were keeping 40% of our budget as their retainer. That's extremely high, and when I started pointing the finger they had nothing but bad excuses.

I've had it up to here with CDK recently. I have dumped a lot of money in SEO towards our OEM website however the site is not converting at all.
We get about 5500 visits a month but only receive about 20 email leads a month! That is ridiculous. (We also have a Subaru website that gets the same amount of traffic but is getting 100+ email leads for both new and used).
The worst of it is that you cannot track their website correctly, the leads form are either in a pop-up form or taking you to a completely different website (i.e. Shop Click Drive) Don't even get me started on SCD, I think it's total crap and a waste of time for our customers...

We are now using Search Optics as far as SEM goes. It's really not the best solution either but at least they are not stealing our Adwords money.
The issue with General Motors is that if you want your SEO and SEM to be co-opped, YOU ARE REQUIRED to use one of their aggregated vendors, needless to say that these companies have so many customers that the results are sub-par.

did you know that if you call CDK and ask them this simple question "which acquisition channel is converting more leads on my website? is it organic? paid? Social Media? they will not be able to tell you because apparently, they don't track that stuff! What a bunch of bollocks...

 

[Jeff Kershner]

Hello Matt, our dealership had been using Cobalt "CDK" SEM services for a long time, when I came on board with the dealership I looked at the numbers and decided to opted out of the SEM service from Cobalt because they were keeping 40% of our budget as their retainer. That's extremely high, and when I started pointing the finger they had nothing but bad excuses.

I've had it up to here with CDK recently. I have dumped a lot of money in SEO towards our OEM website however the site is not converting at all.
We get about 5500 visits a month but only receive about 20 email leads a month! That is ridiculous. (We also have a Subaru website that gets the same amount of traffic but is getting 100+ email leads for both new and used).
The worst of it is that you cannot track their website correctly, the leads form are either in a pop-up form or taking you to a completely different website (i.e. Shop Click Drive) Don't even get me started on SCD, I think it's total crap and a waste of time for our customers...

We are now using Search Optics as far as SEM goes. It's really not the best solution either but at least they are not stealing our Adwords money.
The issue with General Motors is that if you want your SEO and SEM to be co-opped, YOU ARE REQUIRED to use one of their aggregated vendors, needless to say that these companies have so many customers that the results are sub-par.

did you know that if you call CDK and ask them this simple question "which acquisition channel is converting more leads on my website? is it organic? paid? Social Media? they will not be able to tell you because apparently, they don't track that stuff! What a bunch of bollocks...

@Alex.Lemoing thanks for stepping up and sharing some true transparency.

40% cut is a tad bit on the high side! Just a tab. Lol.

Not being able is answer "which acquisition channel is converting more leads on my website? is it organic? paid? Social Media?" doesn't surprise me.

Allow me to ask, have they set up or asked for accuses for your google analytics / api? I'm guessing not.

Btw I love that you use the term "bullocks".

 

[Alex.Lemoing]

Thanks @Jeff Kershner. They've asked for my google analytics but barely looked into it. Their answer for the website not being able to convert leads was that we had an SEO issue. We don't have an SEO issue, yes we could always improve the SEO, but so does anyone else.
We're getting decent traffic on the site.
In my opinion, the real problem lies with GM wanting to collect too much information from the customers.
In order to "create your deal" and send a Shop click drive lead, you have to go through pages and pages of questions... it's seriously ridiculous.
Who really wants to buy a car from home without test driving it anyway? nobody would. I've tried to explain that to my Sales manager but nobody listens to the web guy lol
We're actually in the process of taking all SEO / SEM and all other advertising in house, it's just a matter of time before we figure it all out.
Oh the joy of Co-op loopholes...