Commercial/Fleet Digital Marketing

[Zack_AF]

Hey all,

Are there many dealers here on Dealer Refresh that operate a commercial center? I’ve recently been introduced to and ultimately onboarded some fleet dealers (usually top in their respective state) and get the feeling the commercial business hasn’t changed much digitally in the past 15+ years. Most dealers seem to employ nearly identical digital strategies/partners.

What’s interesting was when we dug into the analytics for the dealers running a separate commercial site, something like 90% of the site traffic is simply a referral click from their retail site. There is very little organic traffic being generated.

Conversations also tell me no-one is ecstatic with the leads they’re receiving from the commercial 3rd party sites either (or lack of).

Curious if anyone has insight into this? How much of the business is still relationship driven vs digital acquisition and is there a reason there just hasn’t been much change?

 

[levin233]

Hey all,

Are there many dealers here on Dealer Refresh that operate a commercial center? I’ve recently been introduced to and ultimately onboarded some fleet dealers (usually top in their respective state) and get the feeling the commercial business hasn’t changed much digitally in the past 15+ years. Most dealers seem to employ nearly identical digital strategies/partners.

What’s interesting was when we dug into the analytics for the dealers running a separate commercial site, something like 90% of the site traffic is simply a referral click from their retail site. There is very little organic traffic being generated.

Conversations also tell me no-one is ecstatic with the leads they’re receiving from the commercial 3rd party sites either (or lack of).

Curious if anyone has insight into this? How much of the business is still relationship driven vs digital acquisition and is there a reason there just hasn’t been much change?

A lot of that space is still relationship driven, which is why digital feels behind compared to retail.

We saw something similar working with fleet focused clients, tons of referrals, repeat buyers, but almost no independent search traffic. When we started digging into it from our side here in Northern Virginia, we realized the sites were never built to rank for commercial intent in the first place.

I used TESSA while helping restructure one of those setups so service pages actually targeted fleet terms instead of mirroring retail content. Once that separation was clear, organic traffic finally started showing up. Commercial needs its own strategy, not a copy of retail.

 

[Zack_AF]

Awesome, thanks for the feedback. Curious on what sort of work you/Tessa did to better optimize for commercial? SEO work around vocations, specific upfit types, things you guys specialized in?

 

[Purrdy]

I’ve used their link-building and audit combo before, and it helped patch up some weak spots on my site without any guesswork. If you want to see the same setup I tried, you can check the details, since it covers their services and how they handle reporting in a pretty straightforward way.

 

[Zack_AF]

Bumping my old thread as I figured I’d share some observations that could provide useful.

I recently went down a VLA rabbit hole specifically looking at upfitted trucks (Ford/GM/Ram) and did a deep dive of 150 or so dealers spanning across the country. My findings? A lot of wasted spend and horrible merchandising.

The first component I noticed was how dealers are running VLAs on their commercial units. I’d wager 95%+ of the dealers I came across running their own ads were sending traffic to their retail site despite having a commercial website. Would love to know why this is so common but the way I see it, it sort of defeats the purpose of having a dedicated commercial site if you’re not going to use it.

The second component is that these retail sites rarely have any upfit information. Again, probably 95%+ of the retail sites I came across didn’t list upfit info but guess what does…their commercial sites! So, dealers are paying for a website, choosing not to use it despite it being optimal for commercial shoppers and instead sending traffic to their retail site missing arguably the most useful information. It’s basically self-sabotage. I can’t imagine anyone with a $10,000+ performance/lift/custom package on a retail unit not highlighting those features but it’s apparently the standard with commercial vehicles.

This last piece is more of a heads up as not every dealer was running their own VLAs but for the many that utilized 3rd party listings, 99% of the time they also didn’t display upfit information. The only exception would be the commercial specific 3rd party site. Would be curious to know how good/bad commercial units do on a Carfax/CarGurus/Autotrader/Cars.com.

My takeaway is that this is an untapped segment where most dealers are asleep at the wheel. Co-Op money is being wasted on websites that aren’t being utilized, marketing dollars are being wasted on expensive vehicles due to poor merchandising, VLA conversions are likely poor and commercial shoppers continue to be treated as an afterthought.

Any dealer that is smart could really lean into optimizing for this and probably clean house in their market. The bar is insanely low.

We’ve been taking this a step further by building custom landing pages to optimize our VLAs by displaying multiple similar units instead of sending straight to the VDP of a single vehicle. We figured if 3rd parties spend millions of dollars a month doing it like this, there’s likely a reason for it.

Turns out it works extremely well and converts much better! If anyone would like some help with this, feel free to reach out.

Lastly, if you want to test what I’m saying for yourself, simply run a model + upfit type (or “work truck”) + city google search (ex. F-550 work truck Orlando, Silverado 3500 flatbed Houston, etc) and you’ll see exactly what I’m talking about. I was also placing myself locally using valentin.app for more accurate search results in a particular market.