CarGurus or CarsDirect

[Alex Magnan]

We're on a basic listing plan with Cargurus. Have received a few leads so far. I will wait a few months to see how that works. I've used Carsdirect before and I wasn't a fan. Always returning bad leads.

 

[sryan]

We signed up with CarGurus at the start of January. We have a pre-owned inventory of ~60 vehicles. So far since Jan 1. we have 14 shows and 9 have taken delivery w/ an avg gross of $1511 a copy.

For some reason I have gotten a lot of Spanish speaking customers with them. Thankfully I have someone here that speaks fluent spanish

 

[skeetle]

We're on Cargurus free leads - I recently changed my e-mails/processes up to better reflect the lead source. Stating that I only have 4 e-mails to the customer, I don't receive their real e-mail address or phone number. For a free lead source, we're seeing fantastic results so far with this change!

 

[benstewart]

Their free leads are surprisingly effective. We close 4-5 per month.

I didn't choose Car Gurus or Cars Direct. We were temporarily on LotLinx and may eventually return to LotLinx once we have a larger inventory and they have better tools to make our Certified Preowned vehicles more prominent as well as better geographical targeting. We received tons of hits on our least expensive new cars and used cars but the results weren't there. I love the concept though.

 

[Baron Ringler]

I dropped CarsDirect like a stone. The ROI had become too little for the amount of work it took sifting through all the garbage they were sending. Besides, I was getting most of those p[eople as duplicates on our website lead counts anyways. To me, second chance vendors are a dead-end path because pretty much every lead source has become loaded with bad credit.

Cargurus? I just haven't seen the success with them. We do okay, but okay to me is just not worth the time.

 

[skeetle]

@Baron Ringler do you have a separate e-mail process set up for Cargurus? Since you only get 4 e-mails with them, I feel like we can't do our typical processes and instead of created a specific one just for that lead source.

 

[jakewirth]

CarGurus is far superior in my experience

 

[George Nenni]

Re-tread on old thread, CarsDirect calling on a few of my dealers, offering $13 leads, wanted to get some fresh opinions based on recent experience. Sounds like leads that are sold to multiple dealers, frustrating the BDC/sales team with high volume/low quality. Thoughts?

 

[Alexander Lau]

Not Autotrader, I know that much. Definitely CarGurus, it crushes what Cars is doing as well.

 

[DavidRozek]

Alright ladies and gentlemen,

I have some budget freed up and have signed on to LotLinx currently and I am actively debating, mostly in my head about paying around $1500 per month for paid accounts on either CarsDirect.com or CarGurus.com - unless you wish to suggest another alternative.

Some information about our dealership. Located in the upper Midwest with new Chevrolet and Buick (400 combined) and 175 used cars. An average of 60 of our vehicles are certified pre owned.

While I'm sure most of you are familiar with both of these sites, here is what I see...

We had a pretty decent (2.5%) percent of VDP to SRP on CarGurus with a free account. My problem with CarGurus? With our number of certified vehicles being pretty large - the second largest in our metro, I fear we are going to be regularly seen as a "fair" or "poor" deal due to the CPO investment.
Otherwise, something is bringing us a decent conversion rate on CarGugus, since we get 18 leads per month and sell one or two.

CarsDirect is fairly straight forward. Costs about the same. More of our competitors are on CarsDirect while not many of our local competition has a paid account through CarGurus. They claim to have strong SEO value but I see CarGurus as the superior SEO site

Am I missing any angles?

FYI - You should be on a paid cargurus product for the $1500. Attached is a partial report from our leads and sales from 8/1 to 8/7. Cargurus is beating Autotrader and Cars.com combined in our market.