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Dealer.com Advertising is a no go according to DDC themselves

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#31
Savvy Dealer said:
Mike - Your comment is something we always hear (Not just with ddc). The customer rep could be nice & communicate well but when you pull back the curtain and actually do a deep dive into analytics you typically see a whole different story. Especially when the person on the other end of phone can't make any adjustments or actually look directly into google ads or analytics. That to me is a big fat red flag because how do you know what they are telling you is true?!
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I appreciate the feedback and agree with you on watching analytics @Savvy Dealer. We have a huge problem in my group with data & analysis addiction.. I also agree with the majority of comments here from others too, lot's of great points here. It all paints a picture of what the challenges we're up against in the automotive landscape of choices for dealers. We have a lot of moving pieces to work through.
Back to the topic of the post though, here's some truth medicine from @yagoparamo that get's right to the point as always... :iagree:
yagoparamo said:
Don't complain, solve it. Learn to use DDC, work with them, or hire another company that you--personality or technically wise--work better with.
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#33
Roger H said:
There's no doubt that Cox is cutting corners when it comes to training the Account Managers...er, I mean Digital Avisors...um...Digital Strategists...oh whatever they are called. Bottom line is there needs to be a relationship with the customer. I was at DDC for 11 years. It's a great place to work with an amazing benefits package. When I left, there were 15,000 DDC sites managed by 150 people, which gives you an average of 100 website. We were also the first line of communication for the dealership, including support requests. Since support requests bypass the DS, that gives them more time to focus on the websites.

If this person has an issue with how things are run, he should have gone to his supervisor. Or HR. But seriously, don't send an email like this
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I truly don't know the set up but I don't think that 150 people managed 15,000 sites.

150 people managed some problems for those sites and directed the traffic for others.

Code (javascript errors for example), 3rd party implementations, menu changes, etc will be sent to some programming level, marketing questions for certain dealers to the marketing department, banner graphics to that department, etc.

In the end if you add all those, plus management, development, etc you have something more like 3.2 people (not scientific based number!) per 100 dealers.

We all tend to forget that when the weather is bad and our plane gets cancelled the airline company support number is busy, that the bank has a line on the 5th of the month, and that the supermarket cashier takes longer on Saturday morning, but all companies struggle with the correct balance of available budget and available support that is always overtaken during peak times.

My office is quiet and dealers think we are awesome when car sales are abundant, put 2 slow weekends together in a row and phones ring of the hook and we suck (just like DDC!).
 
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#34
mikesayre said:
Looks like DDC is implementing a business decision to maximize sales in digital advertising & online services? That's what business does, sometimes the process to make that happen and a refocus into a sales culture is challenging. Cox has done this over the years and across the board for all their companies, it shouldn't be a surprise. They are very successful and are focused on progressive growth. It's unfortunate this objection was aired in public, but I wouldn't believe this will be unique to any vendor in the automotive business going forward. Sales and revenue for dealerships will be in question for some time, and cost cutting with vendors is inevitable.

I'll say DDC has been a great partner for us over the years, and I've always had great relationships with my group managers. They are very accommodating, and work with us to implement our strategy's as a group, OEM level, and at the store level, more often than not our strategies being overly complex:) I've never known how many account's were managed or had any issues with my group managers knowledge or talent of understanding the landscape of automotive with my experiences, but I'm not asking the group managers to do everything either, it's a partnership and the dealers have to carry their load as well. DDC was always accommodating with opening up extra tools to manage a large portion of all the websites and digital services we have, and also keeping things organized for me, I realized early on 7 years ago I couldn't do my job well without their help. If DDC changes the partnership we have, makes it always is about selling services or raising digital spend, I guess we'll have to reevaluate and move on, that's just business.
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Mike, dude I figured it out for you and it's a total frickin' anomaly. It's where your office is physically situated and it's part of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casimir_effect.

Essentially, you're seeing great DDC performance and quality reports from the past, when they actually gave a shit. It's time for your group to move down the street, the wormhole you sit under is creating some space-time issues for you. They're firing reports at you from the past bro!



wormholes.jpg


800px-Casimir_plates.svg.png


Reference:
Stephen Hawking -- Space and Time Warps
http://www.hawking.org.uk/space-and-time-warps.html
 
#37
Alexander Lau said:
Mike, dude I figured it out for you and it's a total frickin' anomaly. It's where your office is physically situated and it's part of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casimir_effect.

Essentially, you're seeing great DDC performance and quality reports from the past, when they actually gave a shit. It's time for your group to move down the street, the wormhole you sit under is creating some space-time issues for you. They're firing reports at you from the past bro!
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Dude..

cb21896e05ca6cd402b9e5fdec93e1d3d3449001_hq.gif
 
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#38
craigh said:
Page Speed Insights is a joke. It's not a realistic calculation of anything, it's just a tool Chrome uses to try and promote and enforce their own guidelines. Much like AMP, you can do better than they can on your own and they will mark it as "needs improvement" because it's not "their" way.

Tools.Pingdom.com uses actual calculations and time spent to produce a report, then shows why the site is actually loading slow, which images are too large, etc.
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Alexander Lau said:
Yeah... I would agree that Pingdom is far better, but that ain't what Google uses and that's part of their algorithm for organic ranking.
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Former Dealer.com engineer here. You hit the nail right on the head. We'd get reports of bad Page Speed Insight scores all the time, citing super slow load times and "errors" that just weren't replicatable. PII is just ranking the site based on Googles own arbitrary guidelines for how they think a website should perform. That being said, Alexander has got a point too. While a PII score doesn't typically correlate to actual site performance, Google does factor PII scores into their search rankings.
yagoparamo said:
Code (javascript errors for example), 3rd party implementations, menu changes, etc will be sent to some programming level, marketing questions for certain dealers to the marketing department, banner graphics to that department, etc
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The majority of website change requests will go to Support, although sometimes the DS will try to complete the request without sending it to Support in order to help out improve turnaround time. Code changes/implementations that don't call for a core platform functionality change will go to a DEV team that works with Support and fields requests from Support themselves.
 
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