Boycott the Third Party Sites like it's 2010!

[Ryan Everson]

I think it is interesting how Cars.com especially steals your VINs for Google VLAs.

I understand they bring in traffic to your vehicles with this, however due to Google VLA running on a VIN level it makes you unable to run these yourself and with them being so powerful that's can be a huge gap in your marketing.

Every third party is running VLA's; it's not unique to Cars.com. And it's certainly not a new practice, third parties have been running dynamic search ads for years, Google just created a new ad format so advertisers followed the cheese.

But I'm hearing similar rumblings from other dealers regarding this practice.

My view: if you are spending your entire VLA budget, but not getting 100% impression share, you might as well let Autotrader, Cars.com, and CarGurus continue to run them too.

That way it's still your cars getting the clicks at least and it doesn't cost you anything extra.

Otherwise by having them turn their VLA's off, you're essentially letting them spend the money on your competitor's cars instead.

Sure it won't convert as well as your dealership site, but some conversions are better than none.

And VLA ad units have 20 vehicle cards, most search keywords that will trigger a VLA have considerably more than 20 eligible vehicles, usually hundreds or even thousands competing for placement depending on location/model.

So if you were to ask them to stop running VLA's for your vehicles, it won't make much of a difference on lowering CPC's unless every other dealer requests it too.

Also with Google's mandated move to Performance Max, time will tell whether VLA's will be as powerful as they once were. VLA's were a great dynamic catalog-based VIN-level ad format that could compete against Facebook's Automotive Inventory Ads. The new Google PMax VLA campaigns took a worthy competitor and substantially dilluted it.

 

[KodyVoyles]

Every third party is running VLA's; it's not unique to Cars.com. And it's certainly not a new practice, third parties have been running dynamic search ads for years, Google just created a new ad format so advertisers followed the cheese.

But I'm hearing similar rumblings from other dealers regarding this practice.

My view: if you are spending your entire VLA budget, but not getting 100% impression share, you might as well let Autotrader, Cars.com, and CarGurus continue to run them too.

That way it's still your cars getting the clicks at least and it doesn't cost you anything extra.

Otherwise by having them turn their VLA's off, you're essentially letting them spend the money on your competitor's cars instead.

Sure it won't convert as well as your dealership site, but some conversions are better than none.

And VLA ad units have 20 vehicle cards, most search keywords that will trigger a VLA have considerably more than 20 eligible vehicles, usually hundreds or even thousands competing for placement depending on location/model.

So if you were to ask them to stop running VLA's for your vehicles, it won't make much of a difference on lowering CPC's unless every other dealer requests it too.

Also with Google's mandated move to Performance Max, time will tell whether VLA's will be as powerful as they once were. VLA's were a great dynamic catalog-based VIN-level ad format that could compete against Facebook's Automotive Inventory Ads. The new Google PMax VLA campaigns took a worthy competitor and substantially dilluted it.

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The reason I mention Cars.com is they will literally not stop running VLA even if you ask they say you have to leave the platform if that is the case. Now I haven't experienced this first hand but have had others tell me this is the case.

Yeah not sure about PMax quiet yet, time will tell I suppose. However, we have been running some VLAs independent from third parties with some of our dealers and we have seen an extremely attractive conversion rate and low CPC for our site.