A challenge for new car dealers

[Todd Caputo]

I challenge you to Google 2014 (any make and model) rebates near (your dealership city). Look at all the different results and see what you get on each site you visit. Does your website have the correct incentive information?? Do you care? Do you think your customers care?

I recently did this and I was amazed at how bad it is for Chevrolet...none of the 3rd party sites had the correct info. None of my competitors had the correct info. We are working with our website vendor to get the correct info. The feed they give us is about 75% correct right now and I want it perfectly correct on my websites..

I would love to hear some thoughts on this subject. I feel the dealers website should have the correct rebate/incentive information for the consumer and it should be 100% correct. I do not want my website visitors leaving to find incentive information at 3rd party sites or my competitors.

 

[Chris Cachor]

I challenge you to Google 2014 (any make and model) rebates near (your dealership city). Look at all the different results and see what you get on each site you visit. Does your website have the correct incentive information?? Do you care? Do you think your customers care?

I recently did this and I was amazed at how bad it is for Chevrolet...none of the 3rd party sites had the correct info. None of my competitors had the correct info. We are working with our website vendor to get the correct info. The feed they give us is about 75% correct right now and I want it perfectly correct on my websites..

I would love to hear some thoughts on this subject. I feel the dealers website should have the correct rebate/incentive information for the consumer and it should be 100% correct. I do not want my website visitors leaving to find incentive information at 3rd party sites or my competitors.

How was it on Edmunds.com?

 

[Todd Caputo]

Try it...it was wrong

 

[ddavis]

I took your challenge and couldn't find anything. I did see Classic Chevrolet's website and got my first exposure to Shop Click and Drive. I'm sure this will be a game changer at least for the immediate future. Check it here. This would appear to be a disaster for small dealers. How long before the other manufacturers follow?

 

[cmjerry4531]

I'm all for being more aware of your Organic surroundings, but I have to step in here.

That phrase, regardless of Make, Model or City combination, doesn't get searched. To do a quick test of your own just hop on SEMRush.com and punch in the keywords. You will come up with "Nothing Found."

The closest you could get are searches like "Toyota Rebates," which is searched a little over 1000 times a month. You will not achieve a number 1 ranking for this because of the existence of Edmunds.com and Toyota.com, but thanks to Google's Venice update you could float in around the 5-10 range for people searching in your area.

Just for good measures, since it relates to you, Todd, "Chevrolet Rebates" gets searched a little over 800 times per month.

As for specific vehicle searches, people tend to stay pretty generic overall. Here's some examples:

Chevrolet Silverado Rebates - 70
Chevrolet Equinox Rebates - 30
Toyota Tundra Rebates - 140

These are all estimates from SEMRush, but it is usually pretty accurate. That's 70 people across the U.S. searching for that phrase, by the way. That means that you probably have <1 person in your area searching for that each month.

If you are still gunning for these phrases, even with the really low volumes, then I would suggest creating evergreen pages for each phrase, e,g, usedcarking.com/chevrolet-rebates, and then usedcarking.com/chevrolet-rebates/silverado. Just keep updating them each month.

 

[Todd Caputo]

Thanks for looking at this...my point really was this...I would think that people doing research on a new car purchase are going to want to get the correct incentive information. They may not google "rebate on a chevy silverado" They may be gathering info on a dealer website or a 3rd party website. My point was this. None of the sites I looked at really had "good" info as far as rebates go. Most of the 3rd party sites had varying information and much of is it was wrong. Most if not all dealer websites had incomplete info including my own sites which we are correcting and we were better than most.

 

[cmjerry4531]

Very true. Incentive information is definitely really low on the priority list for many dealers. Introducing that info in a natural, usable was is even fewer.

Has anyone used incentive as a call to action? 'Get the latest incentives here' type thing.

 

[klane361]

I just dealt with this myself yesterday. Being new to the industry, I am not yet aware of all the incentives/rebates on all our models off the top of my head. So when my customer asked, the first thing I did was go to my deal website. I found nothing. So I tracked down my manager to ask what the "monthly special" was on our new Jeeps. He made me aware, of course, of what they were, but it took me way too long to find the information I needed, and my customer was not very happy with this. Afterwards, I looked on the actual Jeep website and BOOM, there they were. So why is nothing on our dealer site???
Not only would it be good to have this information on our dealer sites for the customers, but it can give the sales people another tool to use to help make the sale.

 

[amarsal]

This is a conversation we have on a daily basis in my store. We are a medium-size Chevy store, and have a Cobalt website. I have the task of keeping up with all of the incentives (yes down to the package level) on our site. Through Cobalt you have the ability to create managed specials that show rebates as a deduction off of your +/- invoice pricing. We show the breakdown of current incentives right there on our site with an explanation of what is required to qualify for said rebates. It can prove difficult when GM offers special incentives like what they have right now on Trucks with Certain packages (All-Star, Custom Sport etc.) or certain engines, as those stock numbers have to be selected individually. I also had to set up a separate feed just for Cobalt to ensure that the pricing displayed properly. It is time consuming and a pain, but I think you are right when you say people want accurate information. I have shopped my competition and multiple Chevy stores in our area, and every site displays different information, so I think people may just have decided not to trust any of it. Which is detrimental to the dealers like us who are trying our best to keep the incentives accurate on a monthly basis.
Here is a VDP from our site.

 

[Bill Simmons]

Our Toyota stores have the up to date incentive info fed to our websites from the distributor. Our other stores are using a company called AIS Rebates that feed the incentive information to their websites. It shows up on the search results page and also the VDP. Customers can click on the box to see all of the available rebates that they may qualify for. I have not heard any complaints about outdated info so assume it is pretty accurate. Hope this helps.