If You Dropped AutoTrader - Where would you put the Money

[George Nenni]

There is so much money sloshing around Auto retail, I'm surprised that no giant player has mapped out the internet car shopping universe on a user flow map (i.e. Google Analytics user flow map).

Plus, I'd love to see a study with 1st party data that would separate the dealer's past customers and show how this past relationship influences the shoppers engagement.

Tough assignment given the data both lives in many places, and increasingly protected. Given those constraints, we must measure quality shop, conversions, and match to CRM whenever possible, as well as being on the watch for bots, phony traffic, etc. Low-quality traffic is easy to spot, yet big providers support packages with traffic that often looks phony.

 

[Zhendrix]

Tough assignment given the data both lives in many places, and increasingly protected. Given those constraints, we must measure quality shop, conversions, and match to CRM whenever possible, as well as being on the watch for bots, phony traffic, etc. Low-quality traffic is easy to spot, yet big providers support packages with traffic that often looks phony.

Sounds like someone needs to solve for this problem...

The challenge grows exponentially for dealer groups using multiple providers via OEM programs and/or management preferences. In addition, many dealers have "custom" ways of using their tech stack. For example, "the crm is setup this way, but we use it that way". The good news is that the other industries have similar problems that we can learn from and solve for. Customer Data Platforms like mParticle and Segment are examples of how CDPs can be use to change "advertising" into simply communications. Unfortunately/Fortunately, most CDPs are NOT verticalized and have stayed away from automotive due to the complexity of legacy tech, protection and fees, and the misalignment of Tier 1-3.

Specific to auto dealers - standardization, symphonization, and data accessibility are key. When you have a dealer group that uses 3 different CRMs/DMS how do you produce a "single source of truth?" Layer in the process components of "this is how we use our CRM but our other store uses it this way"... it becomes challenging to map the (example) 26 fields eLeads has vs. DealerSocket only having 7 status fields. In addition, matching back to your CRM/DMS can't and should not be a manual once a month thing... It needs to happen everyday if not instantly. Our industry is averaging 35-50% match rates and to me, that's unacceptable. The folks on this forum might have better match rates because there aren't maybe newbies here or you're using Driven Data.

Again, we can learn from other industries here. For example... What was the last item you bought online? After you bought it did you get retargeted with the same or similar products for the next 30-60 days on facebook? Ya, that sucks doesnt it? Matching back to your CRM/DMS isnt only about attribution, it's about being able to dynamically suppress your marketing based on the consumer actions. For example, if someone buys a car from you today and googles your name tomorrow because they still owe you that second set of trade keys... WHY ARE WE SERVING UP NEW CAR ADS FOR THEM TO CLICK? Worse off... ever bought something and then got retargeted with a lower price? #saltwound

To answer @Eley Duke question from last year because I'm derailing this post... Don't treat your marketing dollars like a gift card. You don't have to spend it all at Old Navy although my email would suggest they had some pretty sweet Black Friday/Cyber Monday deals. If you haven't yet, consider mapping out your desired outcomes for marketing and treat them like levers/pulleys. You'll know which levers you can push and pull via better budget allocation.

 

[Tony Giampietro]

Our team has done some deep CRM diving on AutoTrader and lead sources lately. The conclusion is we're canceling AutoTrader, which seems to be a growing trend among most dealers I speak with. In Q3 and Q4, plus Q1 of this year, we have sold a staggering............... 4 vehicles off AutoTrader. We get leads, phone calls etc, however they are the worst lead source we have by far, hard to appoint, and have a close rate even worse than GM 3rd Party Leads. We are paying $3,700mo. I have sent a cancellation to them last week.

So if you had an additional $3,700 to market your store and drive traffic, how would you use it?

OTT or Google VLA'S.

 

[Ryan Everson]

Places you could divert AutoTrader money to:

• Cars.com
• CarGurus
• CarFax
• Edmunds
• TrueCar Used Car Listings
• Facebook AIA
• Google VLA
• The bottom line of your financial statement

When we acquire a new store, we'll often try all of the marketplaces out to see which perform best. We look at cost / vdp view, cost / lead, cost / sale, total gross, and sold / leads %.

Third-party performance always varies across markets, inventory mix, and merchandising strategies, so we take all metrics into account. The lowest cost / vdp view doesn't necessarily equate to the highest ROI.

 

[joe.pistell]

We look at cost / vdp view

How do you adjust for bot traffic?

 

[Ryan Everson]

How do you adjust for bot traffic?

1. We (blindly) trust the analytics that the marketplace sites provide and (foolishly) hope they all do an equally good (or poor) job at excluding bot traffic from their VDP view stats.
2. We analyze the trends of all metrics. Did VDP views spike on one site, but the leads didn't follow suit? Was it an internal merchandising issue or a potential bot issue?
3. VDP views are just one of the metrics we take into account - bots don't usually submit leads

 

[LouisGao]

Here in the BC market, we have several dealers dropping Trader as well.
Where are we reinvesting? Google VLA's are new here in Canada so there's that.

Facebook for us has been a crapshoot of fake numbers and emails.