Classified Listings and Cost Per VDP - Relevant still or meh?

[ed.brooks]

Good points @ed.brooks , though one point on your "...5% click rate, a 4% click rate, and 2.5% click rate...", that would be assuming every vehicle on the SRP belong to that dealer. Since SRPs are made up of varying dealers, I'm not sure the number of vehicle per page matters as much. I agree that VDP is one of the money metrics, but you gotta get that shopper to choose you first.

...and it assumes they don't click into the SECOND page of results.
Your point about "winning the click" is huge. Pricing and Merchandising play a huge role in winning the click. I have a dealer group that has two stores located less than 15 miles away from each other. Same make. One store does a better job of putting up multiple quality pictures, writing great comments, and pricing more of their inventory in the Good and Great categories than the other -- it's not surprising that the first store wins more clicks.

 

[bpreston]

Really good information guys! Def. going to have our Digital Marketing Team put together reports like this for our group moving forward.

I have a bunch of small to mid-sized stores so we can't afford to have AutoTrader, Cars.com, CarGurus, and CARFAX. If you can't afford to have all these TPCs what are you deciding factors on deciding which one(s) to cut? Sounds like $/VDP would be one of those factors. What else?

 

[Ryan Everson]

@Ebenn did you disagree with my post because it shows that your employer, AutoTrader, always has the worst ROI when evaluated on a cost / vdp view basis?

So how would you recommend that we evaluate AutoTrader's performance if we're not supposed to based on VDP views, phone calls, form leads, etc?

 

[Alex Snyder]

This Friday. Boom.



It is up to @Dan Sayer if he would like to elaborate on this compliment…. he's good on camera

 

[Dan Sayer]

This Friday. Boom.

View attachment 3939

It is up to @Dan Sayer if he would like to elaborate on this compliment…. he's good on camera

Am I good or is "Dan E. Sayer" good on camera? #instantregret

 

[Alex Snyder]

 

[Dan Sayer]

Reviving this relic thread but I'm in the process of whittling down a 3rd Party Classified at the moment. AutoTrader, Cars.com, CarGurus, CarFax, TrueCar, Edmunds, Oh my. We seem to have amassed all of them again while I was helping with the operations side of our business. I'm jumping back into marketing and we seem to of added everything under the sun. Admittedly, CarFax is safe because the ROI is legit for us and Edmunds will escape the ax because we are grandfathered into a ridiculously low subscription. TrueCar we only have at two locations and they have much better account support this time so they're probably not going anywhere either (plus we're flat rate and not per sold with them). That puts Cars.com, AutoTrader, and CarGurus on the clock. I'm running a 90 day comparison for Leads to Sold and I'm compiling referral data and events but how much weight do I put on VDP in 2025? I can't find the older forum post (pre 2014) but I swear that I added a Google sheet at some point that all could report their cost per VDP. $0.45 per, $0.75 per, etc and I'd use that as a comparison between vendors. I'll run those today and post the results for our markets.

Do you still count VDP views or cost per VDP when comparing 3rd Party Classifieds?

 

[jon.berna]

I kinda still stand by the video above from 2018 that cost per vdp is a reflection of your stocking, merchandising within each provider. When you compare across I think it tells you how good of a deal you have with each of them as a baseline. I think you also have make sure it's apples to apples in what you are calling cost. Since many have bundles with other products that don't generate VDPs.

If you ultimately want to reduce the overall cost per vdp then that's going to take some effective deal making. Sounds to me like you actually need to know if you have good deals, not how to measure value, as you have too many ways to do that.

 

[George Nenni]

Hey Dan, we still tracking VDPs for 3rd parties, with a benchmark of <50 cents cost per VDP. Our benchmark for 3rd party cost per lead leads (forms, calls, messages from third party site) is <$50.00 Post pandemic, not all 3rd parties recovered, some lost 20-30% of their traffic it would seem, requiring dealers to cancel for 6 months, then come back in at a lower rate. Here is a link to a sample of our reporting:
Analytics Express from Generations Digital

 

[Jim Lease]

Dan - Here is a screenshot of your survey results from 2020 for a number of dealers subscribing to Cargurus.