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Autotrader - Good, but $800-900/sale good????

Marc McGurren

Hat Trick
Nov 30, 2009
96
1
First Name
Marc
Hello all.

I need some advice/input from you guys. Right now Autotrader is taking up 1/3 of my entire e-commerce budget for my entire autogroup. Autotrader is great and we do sell cars with them but what I can track 100% - my cost per sale is $800-900.

I understand that Autotrader has a great brand and many customers shop Autotrader and end up coming in based on seeing the car on AT and never submit a lead or call the store.

With that said, I know they have a greater impact than the sales I am recording - but it is hard for me to justify what I am paying. Even if I attribute double my current sales to Autotrader - my cost per sale is still $400-500.

What are your guys experience with Autotrader? Worth the money???
 
I have similar thoughts. Now we, prompted by the pre-owned manager, are looking at changing to the Premium from Featured plan so that we appear in that first group of search results. For 167% more per month we can have one brand of used cars show in that group, or for 233% more, both of our main brands. Keep in mind that all of your other branded used cars still display at the Featured level.

They have shown stats from other dealers that have switched that looked impressive, but I'm just not sure I'm seeing the value.
 
Have you considered Cars.com? Their search results are sorted by price of vehicle, not by how much you are paying them, so you never have to worry about your listings being buried under all the "premium" dealers. You'll never have to fork over more money to ensure your listings get top billing. Your new inventory is included for no additional charge, and they allow you to post 32 photos per vehicle no matter what ad package you have. Check them out if you haven't already...
 
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If you have the right inventory to do it and want to upgrade...look into the Early Model Partnership. It is probably ATCs best performing product. If you price your cars well and have 35 or more vehicles 2006 and older, try it out for a month. I am very curious to see if ATC or Cars,com tries any type of rate increases this year. Make sure your Cars.com program is comparable with ATCs. I am paying exactly the same for both, but my Cars.com program doesn't include video, which would be an extra $300/month.
 
looking at changing to the Premium from Featured plan
Keep in mind that only your PURCHASED premium plan vehicles will be promoted. Meaning that when you buy the "Chevrolet" partner, only your used Chevy's will be promoted. This might makes sense in a 100 car inventory with over 50% in the purchase make. But, do the math first - you are paying $XXX more per car for only a set number in your inventory.

When I was a director over 9 major metro stores I dropped a few from premium to featured plus...notice no real difference in trackable traffic (VDP, phone calls, and emails), ended up moving all my dealers to the featured plus program - FYI

--Drew
 
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Thank you all for your input. It is much appreciated.

We are currently using Cars.com as well and are paying half the price of what we am paying for AT. It is just very hard for me to look at paying double for Autotrader. Autotrader is actually going to do a sourcing study with my past three months customers to see how and what brought the customer in the door. It will be interesting and it will be done by a third party - so we will see what the results are.

I am seriously considering canceling my AT account. It is one of those difficult decisions where we truly have to consider is it worth it. In the end, it might very well be - but you never know until you try...
 
Thank you all for your input. It is much appreciated.

We are currently using Cars.com as well and are paying half the price of what we am paying for AT. It is just very hard for me to look at paying double for Autotrader. Autotrader is actually going to do a sourcing study with my past three months customers to see how and what brought the customer in the door. It will be interesting and it will be done by a third party - so we will see what the results are.

I am seriously considering canceling my AT account. It is one of those difficult decisions where we truly have to consider is it worth it. In the end, it might very well be - but you never know until you try...


I don't see why it's not worth cancelling...if it doesn't work and you miss sales you jump back on. Never know, if you catch the right rep, right DSM who are having a bad month, maybe you come back on at a better rate.
 
As a new internet manager (2 months in internet and going on 3 years in the dealership), this subject is near and dear to my heart.

When I came on, I evaluated all of our lead sources...calculating costs per lead, costs per deal, closing ratios, etc. We have Cars.com and Autotrader.com. We were tracking higher closing ratios, grosses, and 3 times as many deals with Autotrader last year. That sounds great, but the ROI still wasn't all that great.

I have an awesome Autotrader rep. Very helpful from the get go...got in touch with me right away, came over a few different times to help me get running and didn't really try to push me on anything. Wanted to make sure I knew how to use the back end tool and do my merchandising and spotlighting, etc. Long story short, we decided to cut Cars.com and use that money to invest in better placement on Autotrader. It's only been one month, but at this point I am on a $3700 package with them. I got 100 spotlights to use over the first half of the year and most of our cars now show up in the first two pages of search results.

The problem is that we have not seen an increase in click throughs , leads, deals, gross, or anything so far. The only thing that went up this month is our bill. I know that inventory, etc. can be a big contributor, but I feel I have a much better pre-owned inventory this month than I have had for the last few.

In a nutshell, I am wondering what happens if we take our Cars.com/Autotrader funds and invest them in SEO and SEM stuff. 1st party leads seem to be the best ones to work and the highest grosses, so why not invest in generating more traffic to our own site, microsites, etc.?

I know the story with Cars and Autotrader as far as they try to keep you on by making you wonder about all the people that print maps, or just come in and don't mention where they saw the car, etc. but we have taken steps the last couple of months to do more measuring from our "unknown" visitors and it still isn't adding up.

Then just when they get you on the "premium plus package" and you are at the top of the heap, they go behind you and get more money from your competition to stay ahead of you with the "ultra mega super duper premium plus package"...soon we all lose and we are all spending $1500 per deal.

To me it makes sense that I would rather work more first party leads that close at a 20% ratio than 3rd party that close at 8-10%...even if my leads went down, so have my expenses and my deals and grosses would probably go up in that scenario.

As a guy two months in, I would love to skip all of the trials and tribulations and hear what you guys who are knocking it out of the park with an alternative are doing?

Everyone seems to claim to be the king of SEO/SEM, but I am anxious to hear what you guys who are letting go of AT and Cars.com are doing instead?
 
Hey Guys,


I guess I will be the devils advocate here....we actually have great results from Autotrader. With that said we also are on Cars.com, Ebay and just about every other place.

As far as a Autotrader goes, we even just signed up for the alpha program in our area. We used to have a problem tracking some of our sources...we actually all of our sources. So what we did was in F&I we have the business managers ask the consumer what brought them in and also get their email address. We also have our Customer Service manager call every delivery new or used. If in our CRM the customers lead source is not verified she also asks...

As soon as we did that we were able to achieve about a 98% accuracy rate for our sources. I tell you this only because we were extremely surprised to see how many more customers were sold because of Autotrader. Our other sources also increased but it assured us that Autotrader was working for us.

I am sure that some markets are different than others...we do have multiple pictures on both new and used, comments on both new and used as well as videos for all. We price our pre-owned using V-auto. All these things combined have allowed us to get a great return out of Autotrader...

I hope this helps someone!