Cars.com Followup Emails With Other Dealers Inventory
- Thread starter Bill Simmons
- Start date
I can't get a straight answer about the inventory feeds from my Cars.com regional rep. He was going to call me today but just emailed saying he was sorry but was in meetings all day (wonder what about?) and will call me Monday. Tuesday I'll be at Cars booth at DD and will see if I can get some answers there.
I've heard that argument being put forth elsewhere and I don't buy it. We never hear about the newspaper, TV or radio stations complaining about our lack of followup or engagement. They just want us to keep advertising with them, and keep writing them checks. Why should Cars.com care what we do with our customers as long as we keep writing them checks?
Perhaps they need another model, one that has the consumer writing them the checks?
Or alternatively, maybe they should have it in their contract with the dealers that they will stop publishing a dealer's inventory if they don't properly engage with the customer? Something tells me they won't do that.
Steve, while advertising budgets for traditional advertising like the ones you mention, are excluded from ROI scrutiny, internet budgets for display advertising, SEM and third party leads are under a microscope. I have friends among Cars.com and AutoTrader reps that constantly hear complaints about ROI and even abuse from dealership management. If a dealership isn't using actual pictures, for their new a used vehicles, great descriptions, market based pricing along with good processes, you are wasting your money. You wouldn't design a newspaper layout with high prices, bad pictures and a weak description, why would anyone have a VPD like that? Unlike your newspaper layouts, TV and Radio production, the dealership is responsible for that.
Steve, they, in fact, do push your inventory to other sites. Here is a link to another discussion on this.
We don't. If we did, maybe we could hire Cars.com or Autotrader to be our Dealer Nanny. (might have to check to see if www.DealerNanny.com is available)
We are hands on with our newspaper, TV and Radio ads... in fact they are mostly my hands. And yes we do have daily third party surveys asking our customers and prospects sourcing questions so we do look at ROI for traditional advertising.
Point is, we pay the advertising source, be it TV, radio, newspaper or internet. We use Google display advertising, but Google doesn't come to us and say "you aren't following up with the prospects we send you so we must punish you by referring your customers to your competitor's ads that we also happen to display on our network".
Because that is not their job.
Their job is to advertise our message on their medium.
I finally got a reply from the regional rep that they partner with Car Gurus and I could opt out if I just let him know. I replied that not only did we want to opt out of their partnership with Car Gurus, but we want to opt out of ALL of their partnerships until we know who they are and give our approval. I wait to see the reply to that one. I will be visiting the Cars booth at DD next week and will let them know the same thing.
Steve,
I was the GSM of a store back in the 80's where I ran the in-house ad agency. I produced all of our TV and Radio spots and newspaper layouts. The fact that you care, puts you in the minority. Infact, most people that you see on DealerRefresh are in the minority. If you look at most desk logs (yes, managers still have paper logs), you will see that the source is normally "drive by" or "walk in". They have no clue where their customers are coming from. The same is true with the ROI reports that are generated from most CRMs. These only consider internet related advertising expenses. What percentage of dealerships have any type of exit survey? I beat that horse for decades and found that if I want it, I would have to do it myself, with no help from anyone.
If you look at my comments, throughout this thread, you will see, that I am not defending this Cars.com program. I was trying to understand why they implemented it.
Dealers are just paying dues, by subscribing to Cars.com. That gets them into the game. From there they have to add the photos, descriptions and price their cars. They must have good processes to sell the maximum number of vehicles. The ones that seem to complain the most, about ROI, are the ones that do nothing to market their cars and likely have the poorest processes. I was reading a survey that detailed how about 50% of salespeople will call the customer when a phone number is provided.
I always got great return from Cars and AutoTrader. I wouldn't have ever considered cancelling unless they started doing something stupid.
- Dec 30, 2009
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Doug,
Glad you said this. If you are selling 30 cars a month from Cars.com and paying $2,500/month, you don't care about any of this.
I didn't assume you were defending their program, was just making some clarifications. Yes on behalf of the company I work for, I do all I can to make sure all of our advertising and our processes are in good shape. There is still a lot of work to be done. It is largely a thankless task as you probably already know.
As to Cars.com, I have been communicating with one of our reps and asking for more transparency regarding how they market our prospects who view the VDPs we pay for, and who they send our inventory feed to and if they are making bank on that feed in any way or else we would be cancelling. Just got a voice mail message from him basically saying go ahead and cancel. They are not going to be transparent with us. I will wait to see what they say at their Digital Dealer booth this week. Maybe someone a little higher up will give us the transparency and good customer experience that we feel we deserve. I hope so.
- May 1, 2005
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I would make that a certain and not a maybe. Sounds like you have a frustrated rep that's not in the know.
I know for a fact that any higher up would be more than happy to speak with you Steve.
Let me know if you have any issues and ill point you in the right direction.
