Google My Business adds inventory

[paulalanjones]

Possibly good for first adopters, bad for dealerships who surrender more and more of their website's value to Google's data appetite .

Much like musicians and YouTube... give them a feed of your inventory at your expense and when enough dealers take advantage of this "free" marketing option, they collectively give them the ability to be the new Cargurus... and make us pay for it and surrender more of your data in the process. By the time it becomes a problem, it's already too late.

 

[Anthony G.]

I managed to get my inventory on the my GMB listing with CDK. We had a little trouble getting the feed correct. They do scrape the site. We share used inventory with 10 other dealers in the group. So we had to get them to scrape the location from the vdp and omit any that weren't in our physical location.

Link if you want to see it live.

Google Search

 

[Dan Sayer]

Possibly good for first adopters, bad for dealerships who surrender more and more of their website's value to Google's data appetite .

Much like musicians and YouTube... give them a feed of your inventory at your expense and when enough dealers take advantage of this "free" marketing option, they collectively give them the ability to be the new Cargurus... and make us pay for it and surrender more of your data in the process. By the time it becomes a problem, it's already too late.

Put the foil hat down and step away. You do realize @paulalanjones, that they crawl all our sites fairly regularly for all that data and more without us volunteering a thing? Which I WANT to happen in order to get found. Google actually has difficultly with the inventory feeds, from the mouth of Google Auto itself, so they prefer to scrape anyway. In fact, the vendor we're working with now says that 99.9% of the initial Alpha clients on the Cars For Sale Google program are being scrapped, no inventory file being sent.

And it isn't like musicians and YouTube. We are not selling a copywrite protected or licensed product. We are selling goods and services. All of which I want to be found anytime by anyone and anywhere searches are done for those goods and services.

 

[Rick Buffkin]

@Anthony G. I don't see your inventory on your listing or am I missing something?

 

[Jim Lease]

@ Rick Buffkin - The inventory button only shows up on the mobile view right now. That will change in time, but for right now it's only on the mobile view.

 

[Rick Buffkin]

Thanks @Jim Lease. I just checked on mobile. It looks good @Anthony G.

 

[jscole86]

bump - anyway to do this with HomeNet / vauto / or our own inventory feed?

 

[Dan Sayer]

bump - anyway to do this with HomeNet / vauto / or our own inventory feed?

99% of the agencies partnering with Google on this project are just scraping a URL, which according to Google is preferred. We had to be difficult and since we share inventory on all sites, we (and by we I mean my guy Chad Sabatka) were able to work with DBA Platform to schedule a custom feed to their FTP with store-specific inventory for each of the 8 GMB profiles we chose to test. It was a little jenky and took some work with them (they weren't very responsive), but works. I don't believe these agencies are set up to work with industry providers but I'm sure you could figure it out @jscole86. I did just get a marketing email this morning from Dynamic Beacon stating they could do now as well.

 

[Dan Sayer]

99% of the agencies partnering with Google on this project are just scraping a URL, which according to Google is preferred. We had to be difficult and since we share inventory on all sites, we (and by we I mean my guy Chad Sabatka) were able to work with DBA Platform to schedule a custom feed to their FTP with store-specific inventory for each of the 8 GMB profiles we chose to test. It was a little jenky and took some work with them (they weren't very responsive), but works. I don't believe these agencies are set up to work with industry providers but I'm sure you could figure it out @jscole86. I did just get a marketing email this morning from Dynamic Beacon stating they could do now as well.

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When I said "jenky" I meant it. Why are the Used Ford's the priority on the inventory for this GMB at Mazda? SMH

 

[Greg Spencer]

So now inventory is appearing in Google search (and not in just Google My Business windows)? Has anyone else seen this?

Google local car dealership inventory search results

Google seems to be getting into the local car inventory space with a new search service.

searchengineland.com