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My entire dealer group just canceled Cars.com. More lead providers to come!

SeanWoodruff

Bone King
May 14, 2011
63
18
First Name
Sean
We're only 7 dealerships, but are one of the largest and most profitable in New England. This is big for us because this is usually a dealership-specific decision. For them to force something onto the entire group is huge.

Nothing against Cars.com, but we're really trying to move away from lead providers and classified listings. This is a big step for us and I believe a step in the right direction. We want people to get to our website and due to our huge digital marketing efforts, we believe if they are shopping for a car in our area then they will find us.

I hope that more dealerships are inspired to look at their digital marketing and put their money in the right places.
 
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while I understand your motives - the true impact may not show for a couple of months as your sales team works through their existing leads harder as they are not getting the new ones from cars.com - there may be some spaces where they were competing with your own efforts but there has to be spots where they were that you are not

obviously you need to track where your leads are coming from moving forward and the numbers and cost of them etc - if you have enough to keep your sales where they were then congrats - if you only lose a few sales but against the cost of cars.com it is positive - less sales but higher profits etc then a good move

but you should also keep track of what your competitors are doing - they will benefit from the leads you leave on the table

please keep the forum informed - is a test would love to see the long term success of
 
Cars.com has nearly 1100 dealerships within 50 miles of Boston, 43 being Ford dealers. Many dealers find the most success by casting a wide net. A balance of third party leads, website SEO and most recently text message lead capture can round out a successful marketing plan.
 
We tossed cars.com and auto trader a few months back. Reinvested that same money into driving people to our site. Have seen an increase in leads. Sure do miss all those internet requests for the wholesale pieces we gave 200 for and are prohibited to sell.

Good move on your part!
 
We tossed cars.com and auto trader a few months back. Reinvested that same money into driving people to our site. Have seen an increase in leads. Sure do miss all those internet requests for the wholesale pieces we gave 200 for and are prohibited to sell.

Good move on your part!

Same here, we just cancelled TrueCar and Cars.com. Spent 90% of that existing budget on driving more traffic to our website and have seen the same increase in leads. We've not missed either site.