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

[Aussiewebmaster]

Wow, Yago's crushin' it.

Here's my take on DR. In it's purest form, We all come here to share read ideas to help the dealer, not the vendor (me incl'd). IMO, vendors need to deliver great help to the community to earn their position as a trusted advisor. Once you've established yourself, then you're part of the community!

If you have a product to promote, Offer your product free to a group of dealers and publish the results here. You've kept your secret sauce hidden and your results do the talking.

interesting how this thread has gone from original topic

 

[Manny Luna]

Joe,

I don't know what the secret sauce you're talking about. I did post and share it with the DR community, please forgive me if nobody had a chance to read up on it.
The keywords were "hijacking traffic" "classified sites" and "unbranded lead sites"


I do want to humbly thank DR for letting me be a part of the community!


Best regards


Manny Luna

 

[Jeffrey Tognetti]

Sean,
How have you decided to replace those 3rd party leads? Additional spends where? Also what did you find most interesting if anything at Digital Dealer?

 

[Uncle Dave]

From the view of someone whose paycheck is dependent on getting more phone calls and emails into their department (which I suspect is most dealer people on this forum), I can understand the BDC/Internet Director's euphoria over increasing "leads" as a result of throwing more money at promoting their own website. I get that. After all, there's no need for an Internet or BDC Director position if there are no prospects calling or emailing, right?

But from the DP or GM view, is making the decision to not have a presence on either of the largest automotive classified sites in order to boost the activity of a single department the best thing for the dealership as a whole? Not talking about buying 3rd-party leads here, talking about advertising your inventory on classified sites that don't force visitors to fill out a form in order to shop.

It is generally agreed that a huge majority of car shoppers use the Internet and that the majority of car buyers do not call or email before coming to the dealership (despite a certain "expert's" howling that he doesn't believe it). Ever bought a big screen TV? You go to the Best Buy or H.H.Gregg website, check out the TVs and get in your car to go see them, touch them, hear them and see what else might be a better deal when you get there. You don't call, you don't email. Why would you?

With the explosive increase in mobile becoming the preferred channel for car shopping, isn't it even more likely that the typical shopper will just drive to the dealership since they are already - wait for it - mobile? So, is your dealership jeopardizing a much larger potential buying pool in order to help the BDC make inroads into a much smaller number of people who will call or email? Just asking.

An analogy; you can immediately increase your calls and emails by removing the selling prices from your website. Sure, you'll get more calls and emails. You'll win that battle for the Internet Department. So why don't you do it? Because you'll lose the war for the dealership by turning off a much larger pool of potential buyers who ignore listings without prices. It's harder to measure those people but you know they are there, as are the large number of local shoppers on the major classified sites who go there to narrow their choice of car and dealer.

I think lightnup says it all. It is easy to cancel classified vendors based on low lead and call counts. But the shrewd metric to look at is vehicle detail page views, and many dealership decision makers don't know these numbers from their own websites, let alone their 3rd party listings. For me, my threshold is about a buck per view, and historically, Cars.com generally meets this benchmark. Autotrader is almost always way over on this measure, but I console myself by thinking of them as the most expensive TV station in town. In short, it's about eyeballs, because today, people click tires long before they ever kick them.

 

[dvMail]

I look forward to bumping this thread in a few months to hear how lead generation is going after the cancel.

 

[Jeffrey Tognetti]

I think lightnup says it all. It is easy to cancel classified vendors based on low lead and call counts. But the shrewd metric to look at is vehicle detail page views, and many dealership decision makers don't know these numbers from their own websites, let alone their 3rd party listings. For me, my threshold is about a buck per view, and historically, Cars.com generally meets this benchmark. Autotrader is almost always way over on this measure, but I console myself by thinking of them as the most expensive TV station in town. In short, it's about eyeballs, because today, people click tires long before they ever kick them.

What I highlighted in blue is the only weakness in your argument. Most of the web is now "bot traffic" and you can't count total views of a VDP or your inventory as it is far..far..far.. from accurate. The supplement to your argument is about "Attribution". Is Cars.Com and AutoTrader part of a consumers online browsing habits when looking to purchase or lease a car. And, if yes, how heavily are they weighted out of all the places your cars display online? Finally, what are Cars.Com & AutoTraders weighting versus other sites? IE; Are they always in the consideration set of where shoppers will go to find a car online? If so, how much?
Ultimately one has to determine what 3rd Party venues your dealerships cars are on, how often those sites are top of mind for consumers searching for a car versus how much $$$ that attribution worth.

Attribution Cost VS. Yield Analysis

For now Cars.Com and AutoTrader are in the consumer mindset, albeit increasingly becoming watered down by the True Cars, Car Gurus, etc etc of the world creating noise or disruption in the space.

The problem is no one talks about attribution in the buying funnel, and attribution is everything-

 

[Uncle Dave]

My comments were mostly about Cars and Autotrader VDPs, which only happen for the dealer when someone clicks on the ad. However, we see a strong correlation between website vdps and total store sales. If some bots are involved, oh well, the numbers still go up or down accordingly. As with TV, some folks skip the commercials, but reach, frequency, and rating points still help you make decisions about audience. Yet you raise a valid point about bots. As it turns out, Google Analytics automatically filters out a lot of the bot traffic, plus you can set up additional filters. http://www.yottaa.com/blog/bid/223629/Google-Analytics-How-to-Segment-and-Filter-Robot-Traffic.

 

[yagoparamo]

I don't think that what sparked this debate was whether Autotrader or Cars.com are better or not than TV or whether the VDPs they produce are a good investment or not VS traditional media. Those seem, somewhat, old arguments that we have already accepted as true.


But a more serious question has been: What are the alternatives to renting lead assets?


As much as you hate paying Autotrader, Cars, TrueCar, etc the alternatives also cost money. So the change must be for a better ROI (even though that is harder to measure than we would like to).

Autonation threw a curved ball and made a change not just because of the better ROI but to invest the money into their own business and to stop paying rent to the 3rd party lead providers.

The change to invest in Google product, content, video, social, sep, etc must have 2 very important qualifiers:

1) Better ROI
2) Better brand(dealer)/name recognition

and it has 2 important problems to solve:

1) Step time frame
2) Dislike from the OEM (brand(dealer) recognition VS brand(OEM) recognition. Look at the recent Cobalt/GM campaign to get dealers to cancel their secondary sites and just have the OEM mandated one. Is all for OEM control over the dealer and the dealer buys into it.

 

[ddavis]

"Autonation threw a curved ball and made a change not just because of the better ROI but to invest the money into their own business and to stop paying rent to the 3rd party lead providers."

Yago, I would hate to look to AutoNation as my model. However; I agree with the rest of your post.

 

[yagoparamo]

"Autonation threw a curved ball and made a change not just because of the better ROI but to invest the money into their own business and to stop paying rent to the 3rd party lead providers."

Yago, I would hate to look to AutoNation as my model. However; I agree with the rest of your post.

Well... we are a few billion short to be able to follow Autonation but definitely they mark the pace sometimes.