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.