Hello everyone,
Just to clear up any confusion around this, we're always taking a look at our partnerships and the value they provide to our customers. As part of that process, we did indeed end our tenure as the exclusive provider of used-car listings on the Yahoo! Autos site, effective Jan. 1, in line with our strategic focus on investing heavily in extending the Cars.com audience and innovating our products and services for consumers, dealers and other advertisers.
After the end of the exclusive contract period with Yahoo, we ramped up our SEO and SEM efforts, including reconfiguring our site and investing in other partnerships to optimize our search presence and raise our profile with in-market car shoppers. One example of these changes is our increased focus on SEO landing pages, which means that users can find vehicles on Cars.com without always starting with a homepage search, leading to deeper consumer engagement and a more quality audience for our dealer partners.
As a result, most dealers were unaffected by the end to our contract with Yahoo, and in many cases, saw more leads and higher conversion rates. In fact, our leads site-wide were up 14% in Q1 2012 compared to 2011.
Ryan, my apologies that you haven’t gotten the information you need from your sales rep – I’ve asked the sales manager in your market to reach out to you. If you would like to contact me directly (or if anyone has any additional questions on the Yahoo! Autos relationship or SEO/SEM efforts I’ve outlined above), please feel free to contact me at lbartman@cars.com or 312.601.5749.
Linda Bartman
Vice President, Marketing
Cars.com
