All – Nick Hummer from Cars.com chiming in. This is a great conversation, and I’ve been really interested to hear what’s working for you, what’s not, and what else you’d like to see from us. I did want to clear up a few inaccuracies relating to how we report on data, and SRPs specifically:
Unless it has changed, SRP's are always higher on Cars.com reporting because they report every time you come up in a search, even if you are on page 10 and the customer doesn't get that far.
This one comes up often, and I suspect it will come up again, but for the record: Cars.com only records an SRP impression for a dealer if that vehicle appears on the page being viewed. This means that if a search returns 10 pages of results, but the user only looks at page 1, the vehicles returned on page 1 will record an impression. The vehicles on page 2 through 10 do not.
About 4 months ago, I was told about a difference of how ATC and cars.com calculates an SRP from our reps... Say you are searching and pull up an SRP, then click on a details page, and then click back to the SRP, cars.com will count this as 2 SRP's, where ATC counts this as 1 SRP because the consumer simply went back to the last page.
This one is correct – it’s true that we count each viewing of an SRP as an impression, and what it came down to for us after much discussion internally is that we feel there’s value to the advertiser in repetition. This is actually a pretty standard practice across most media types, as you probably know. For example, if you buy billboards, the number of impressions your outdoor vendor probably claims for a particular board is usually based on how many times it’s viewed, not by the number of unique viewers. That means if I drive past your billboard four times, I’m counted four times. Forgetting about how that affects the perceived value of your vendor for a minute, you’re receiving a benefit from reinforcing your message with me – you should have some visibility into that. I’m definitely open to your feedback on this approach and am happy to discuss this and our reporting methodology overall with you, so feel free to reach out and we can talk in more detail.
We’re aware that this is a topic that comes up often. For additional information on how we track SRPs or any other metric, we posted some information last year here:
Cars.com DealerADvantage » Cars.com Podcast » Cars.com Reporting Methodology. The PDF and the video have similar information, but if you’re watching the video, jump to 1:06 for the explanation on SRPs.
Thanks again for sharing your thoughts, and please feel free to call or e-mail me personally if you ever want to share your feedback or discuss anything you’re reading here offline.
Thanks,
Nick Hummer
Director of Local Solutions
312-601-6004
[email protected]
(That way oversimplifies the book, BTW. There is a ton of applicable stuff in there, and a mention of DealerRater by name as well. You should read it ASAP FWIW)
