Have you been blitzed by team ATC yet?

[Carlo]

"They have obviously maxed out on getting car dealers to pay them "newspaper" money from the used cars and keep trying to grow revs by changing strategy and becoming a "new car search site??"

Bingo!

Except their "new car" search audience is only about a tenth of what their used car audience is. The manuf's have pulled the plug on the majority of the co-op funded programs with autotrader, be they used or new programs and dumped alot of funds into search engine display advertising, so I'm really curious to see what transpires with autotrader in the next 12 months. I think they've finally run out of room.

 

[Amanda Marsal]

I saw the whole dog and pony show a few weeks ago on the new car listings. We already pay them about $8,000 a month between all of our stores, and now they wanted an additional $2,300 per store to list our new inventory. We have a free feed on the new car sites already. I love the word tracks that they use though, very cliche. " I don't know if my boss will let me do this, but I'll deal with that later." "You will be one of the first dealerships in the area to get on board with this, so all the traffic will come your way!" etc.
I am also shopping for a inventory solution and they have a company called CarSpot that I looked into. He came with the ATC blitz reps and must of been new, because he didn't know much about the product. When I asked for a few different things regarding the pricing, it took three weeks and three different people to get me an answer. I ended up contacting my local rep (which is the best part of AutoTrader she's great) and she got back to me with the info the next day. I think that many dealerships are no longer waiting for them to come by with open checkbooks!

 

[Edward Shaffer]

I will take the under...this one played out in the last thread in Nov...

AutoTrader does cost more and we look at the measurement of cost per sale generated by our third party lead providers.

Of course the tracking is where everyone differs...ATC would like us to credit them for xx.x% of the pre-owned walk in traffic that 'must' have been generated by the large number of shoppers who printed our maps/directions. We actually recently created an exit survey for F&I to get a better picture of where our advertising is more effective in driving sales.

Currently, we track every incoming call, incoming email lead etc. and trace back to the source to match up sales...which currently puts our cost per sale at about $400 for the first 5 months of this year. Our CEO would prefer a $300 cost per sale, and we have heard differing opinions of anywhere from $400 to $600 per sale - Opinions?? - email me at [email protected]

We are a Premium Listings dealer in a large metro area market, so perhaps that explains part of the difference...perhaps it is our process that makes the difference...we always factor in process when evaluating a lead provider to make it more equitable - you have to look inside and accept some of the responsibility for poor performance.

Bottom line is that they do cost more and they are heavy handed but we can justify the expense so we continue to use them. I did recently cut back the $900 per month we were spending for 10 additional Spotlights as I cannot detect an appreciable difference in leads with or without them. Several of our other locations just reduced their contracts to Featured Plus at a savings ofabout $3K per rooftop so I am waiting to see if they can improve their cost per sale before jumping ship on the Premium Listings.

 

[Joe Pistell]

Ed,
Do you use a post-sale survey to gather marketing data?

Joe

 

[Amy]

You guys should take advantage of the blitz team. they are in your market for one week and since they dont have a relationship with you ...like your local rep (hopefully)...the thing they can offer you is incentive to sign today=good deal.

There is a reason we are so expensive. we are worth it. i have dealers in my market paying us well over 20K a month. why? because they see the value & recognize that although we do provide "leads" we also provide the best bang for their buck in reaching in market buyers.

think about it. why would anyone even go to autotrader.com if they arent looking for a car? there are no sports scores, no news, no pictures of beautiful women. the only thing we- autotrader.com- can offer you is that 100% of your dollars go towards advertising to the people who are in the market to buy a car. where is the waste?
Now think about what your store does in direct mail, billboards, tv, radio....where is the waste there?

today the name of the game is minimize your losses.

instead of being upset-like we are trying to take advantage of you - you should consider that we are on the same team. afterall- we are both here to move metal.

...take a look at the amount of people who see your inventory (exposure), respond to your ads (vehicle details-virtual walk arounds), get a map to the store (how many times do you get a map online & NOT show up?), go directly to your site, print out information.....dont discount it. yesterdays showroom traffic is todays internet traffic. you are selling yourself and your dealer short if you do not consider all that we bring to the table.

 

[Chris (blog)]

I think if you had several dealers in one area all call to cancel their contracts the same day, in many different locales simultaneously the guys at the top might pay attention and drop their rates? I sort of feel there's a monopoly and I'd like to see more players get into it.

Unfortunately COX Communications is the real culprit and I am sure some anti-trust laws could be challenged in relation to AT and COX's agenda to own every current in the stream.

 

[Phil Crecenzo]

"There is a reason we are so expensive. we are worth it..."

4 or 5 years ago, sure I'm with you on that, I'm sure others will agree. In 2008 (now) there are many alternatives out there that can generate almost the same local audience wide exposure to our used and especially new inventories.

If our ROI kept up with the percentages of rate increase from autotrader this would be a moot point but as countless of us have said in the past, it hasn't.

We had a "blitz" visit a couple months ago as another mentioned it was a little refreshing to have a visit from a rep that actually knew the product, our local rep seems clueless to the automotive market.

 

[Alex Snyder (blog)]

Amy,

Is that grape or fruit punch? You enjoy drinking that Kool-Aid, but please don't offer me any. I can't stand that stuff.

Phil is right. There are many, many, many alternatives to AutoTrader right now. It isn't about a captive audience on ATC, which is a farce of a thought anyway, it is about measuring ROI right now. Are your dealers who are spending over $20,000 a month making over $100,000 in profit with ATC that same month? Or are they turning maybe $5,000 to $10,000 in profit once the bill is paid? With all the forms and places of advertising online, you have to provide a much larger ROI if you're going to charge a much larger price.

 

[Kevin Frye]

We are in a performance based industry - if we don't perform and sell cars, we don't have jobs. Guess what? That applies to our vendors as well. If your product does not perform - why should we keep you? When the cost of AutoTrader is 3 times more than other vendors that provide the same if not more page views, email leads, phone calls, and sales, how do you justify your cost? When we measure the ROI of all vendors, and AutoTrader is not nearly as good as many of our other partners, and comes at a significantly higher cost, why should we keep them? Bottom line for me is that while AutoTrader has some exposure in the market, they are pricing themselves out of the market against their competition. We are not getting added value that is justified by the cost. In the end - it is business - ALL of us must perform!

 

[Brian in Etown]

I would encourage you to open the June copy of Digital dealer or paste the link below
Mr. Gillrie has a relevant article on overpaying for technology

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www.digitaldealer-magazine.com

has more to do with DMS prices but I found this compelling piece of info....
"your intuition tells you that a dollar saved has exactly the same effect on the bottom line as earning an extra dollar of gross profit. Your intuition, in this case, would be very wrong. As you can see in the chart below, the reality is that it takes a lot more than a dollar of gross to pay for a dollar of computer expense. It turns out that a dollar saved actually has the same effect as earning $7.74 in gross profit."

hmmmm?