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

[Dan Sayer]

@Dan Sayer @georgenenni @craigh @Anthony G. Since Ford made these adjustments, has anyone seen a bump in referrals from the Ford Blue Advantage site?
The AIM Group's working on an article about FBA. Autotrader and Ford tell us that the inventory page gets much more traffic now than when it was operated by Ford in-house.

No referrals and 4 leads this year. All four leads are at least an hour to 8 hours away from the store. We have 45 units marked in the program and only 15 are showing on the site (need to figure that out). I'll admit that I have no idea if there is a reporting aspect to the backend to view SRP and VDP on our units. I'll check.

 

[Greg Spencer]

Thanks for the update @Dan Sayer !

 

[George Nenni]

No referrals and 4 leads this year. All four leads are at least an hour to 8 hours away from the store. We have 45 units marked in the program and only 15 are showing on the site (need to figure that out). I'll admit that I have no idea if there is a reporting aspect to the backend to view SRP and VDP on our units. I'll check.

Hey Dan, yes there is a backend to get the reporting. For Autotrader customers, the reporting is built into their backend. For dealers that do not use Autotrader, they can call 866-530-2308. It is a dedicated line for Ford Blue Advantagedealers. The dealer should identify themselves as a Ford Dealer and they will get set up with an account with the right log in credentials. The FBA reporting is out of the new Cox reporting system.

For our FBA dealers, the numbers look very low. Both direct SRPs, VDPs, and leads. VDP/SRP ratio also super low (maybe inaccurate). Also referral traffic from FBA is very low. They still are blocking Google spiders from SRPs and VDPs, not sure why.

Robots.txt file contains:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cars-for-sale/vehicledetails.xhtml

On a side note, I think there is a HUGE opportunity for Ford dealers to build out FBA content pages on their website, and score well on page 1, since Ford is not. Try Googling, "Ford Blue Advantage" in your market, dealer content pages are all over page 1.

 

[Dan Sayer]

Hey Dan, yes there is a backend to get the reporting. For Autotrader customers, the reporting is built into their backend. For dealers that do not use Autotrader, they can call 866-530-2308. It is a dedicated line for Ford Blue Advantagedealers. The dealer should identify themselves as a Ford Dealer and they will get set up with an account with the right log in credentials. The FBA reporting is out of the new Cox reporting system.

For our FBA dealers, the numbers look very low. Both direct SRPs, VDPs, and leads. VDP/SRP ratio also super low (maybe inaccurate). Also referral traffic from FBA is very low. They still are blocking Google spiders from SRPs and VDPs, not sure why.

Robots.txt file contains:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cars-for-sale/vehicledetails.xhtml

On a side note, I think there is a HUGE opportunity for Ford dealers to build out FBA content pages on their website, and score well on page 1, since Ford is not. Try Googling, "Ford Blue Advantage" in your market, dealer content pages are all over page 1.

Thanks @georgenenni. Ford sent me that direction yesterday and we have an FBA rep coming to our market Thursday to meet with us. In addition, they provided [email protected] as the email for non-AutoTrader dealers to send requests for dashboard reporting. I did this yesterday and did get a "received" but no answer yet. I like the idea of getting ahead of the pack in our markets on content. Within our markets, I can't find anyone doing this yet. Dealers coming up are 4 hours or more away.