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Are you hearing of Ford's new CPO program, certifying non-Ford vehicles?

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#2
georgenenni said:
Our Ford dealers are reporting details on Ford's new CPO program, with 2 tiers, blue & gold, which will include non-Ford vehicles with a much lower & cheaper coverage. Anyone else have more detail on this?
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Let me see if I can find a one-pager for you. In the meantime, this article describes it better than I could https://www.carsdirect.com/deals-ar...cost-cpo-program-to-battle-online-competitors

Digital assets started showing up today in the Ford toolbox but there are some items still up in the air. I do know Ford partnered with AutoTrader to run the listing site (they currently push CPO for dealers free on AT) but has plans to partner with Cars.com, CarGurus, Carfax, and KBB. Digital Retailing on the initial site is Accelerate but they're also partnered with AutoFi (which Ford is invested in). I did get into an interesting email string with the two Ford associates leading the eCommerce portal about their initial decision to use "Buy Now" which they eventually admitted that it hadn't been tested yet so will launch with a better CTA. We'll see...
 
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#3
Very nice, thank you @Dan Sayer ! On the 3rd party classifieds, a little known fact for Ford dealers is their CPO inventory is currently not available on Cars.com This is why typically Ford dealers who are heavy CPO, will struggle to hit benchmarks for cost per conversion on Cars.com Same situation for Hyundai and Kia. This has been the situation for the last 14 months or so, rumored to be remedied early February 2021, but I've seen planned dates come and go so will wait to see it live.
 
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#4
georgenenni said:
little known fact for Ford dealers is their CPO inventory is currently not available on Cars.com
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Clarify @georgenenni. Our CPO Fords are on Cars.com. They are also on AutoTrader even though we are not an AutoTrader dealer. Are you speaking to the fact that Ford doesn't push free CPO listings to Cars.com or that Cars.com is filtering something?
 
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#6
They aren't tagged or searchable as CPO, see below. It has been this way since around November 2019. They can't seem to put together a deal between Cars.com and the OEMs. I think the dealers should have been notified, all of our dealers are aware, a few cancelled.

New_Cars__Used_Cars__Car_Dealers__Prices___Reviews___Cars_com.jpg
 
#7
georgenenni said:
They aren't tagged or searchable as CPO, see below. It has been this way since around November 2019. They can't seem to put together a deal between Cars.com and the OEMs. I think the dealers should have been notified, all of our dealers are aware, a few cancelled.
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I didn't know that. Thanks for pointing that out. Not cool Cars.com, not cool!
 
#10
Ford dealers, are you seeing much referral traffic from the new Ford Blue Advantage website? So far, we're only seeing small amounts of referral traffic from the FBA website to Ford dealer websites. The new site is hosted by Autotrader.com, utilizing their strong website display and reporting capabilities. In doing some investigating, it looks like Google knows very little about the new FBA website. Running a simple "site:" test, the attached screenshot shows only one indexed page.

This worries me, since I've always suspected that third-party classifieds rely heavily on organic search traffic. If Google is not deep-indexing the FBA website, that will really limit their volume of organic search traffic. In doing a few searches for "Ford certified vehicles near me", I pull up a single Ford certified page on the main Ford site, but the only vehicle listings are coming from other third-party classifieds sites, or dealer websites. This feels like a missed opportunity for Ford dealers. We'll keep watching the traffic for our Ford dealers, hopefully to see some growth in the volume.

Any Ford dealers seeing large amount of referral traffic or activity from this site?

Ford Blue Advantage Indexing issue LI post 3-9-2021.png
 
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