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Thanks for diving into this topic, Marty; and I'm not trying to pile on or blindside you, but I'm curious how you view the dealer relationship in terms of the results you wrote about. For example, one of my clients is ready to cancel CarGurus because of your process of retargeting his prospects (leads he received from you via a paid subscription on his vehicles). Specifically, he's angry that:

  1. On the very first day, you send an email to his prospect inviting them to "Compare Cars" and "Sell Your Car." Both of these activities are unfriendly to the paying dealer who may now have additional competition AND may not be able to secure a trade vehicle because you invited his prospect to sell their car online.
  2. On Day 5 you show his prospect actual alternate vehicles sitting on competitor lots and again ask his prospect to sell their car online (without the dealer).
  3. On Day 7 and again on Day 15 you send his prospect an invitation to review the dealer. While I'm sure this pumps up your dealer reviews, it's not fair to any one dealer, given that their close rate of your leads averages (I'm guessing) less than 10%. Even if they close 20% of your leads, this means 80% of the invitations to review go to someone who never bought from the dealer and is more likely to make negative comments. (I believe my client's own reviews on other sites bear out this notion, given they are well above 4 stars on Google and Yelp, yet hover barely at 3 stars with you.) 

I think given these communications (which my client deems extremely dealer-unfriendly), you can understand everyone's concern about CarGurus collecting data from the DMS that can be had elsewhere (like registration data, for example).