I think the discussion shouldn't be "I'm happy I cancelled 3rd party leads" but "I'm happy I found a better ROI by investing in my business". Money needs to move from one resource to another to maintain the number of leads and business.
The problem is that in the past dealers didn't do digital advertising, they just spent money in digital companies that others owned. There has been a lack of creativity in digital like it used to be in the news paper, magazines, bill boards, TV, radio, etc. Dealers thought of unique ways to make the ads stick, in digital we just pay. Most dealers digital creativity is translated into the monthly banners in the front of the website. Dealers were also in general adverse to build content (whether that is videos or text) that they owned to build their own web presence.
This whole dilemma is not new, Jerry Tibeau had a great webinar last year about this and many other vendors have encouraged dealers to invest on organic content, articles, videos, etc but few do. It is actually extremely hard to get dealers to do it. I've been building blogs for dealers Barrier Volvo – Bellevue Volvo Dealer - since 2005 with unique content for $200 and I've nothing but negative reviews from other vendors when I show them, everyone seems to have an opinion on how they should be done but no one else actually does them (they shouldn't have inventory, they should have more community blogs, they shouldn't be make key worded, you shouldn't have links back to the dealer's website, don't use content from the manufacturer because that us duplicate, you need to use better key words , etc). I'm not saying I build the best blogs out there nor that you need a blog as the ultimate content strategy, but it is a good start. If you are not willing to invest $200 in a platform that creates content and that allows your employees to add their own content... we are going to have a hard start.
To Joe's and Manny's previous points and without getting into PPC (because most people already know what PPC is). We have been creating long tail search content for years. See the examples below. Magic Toyota ranks pretty well on those Corolla searches in the city of Everett, you should know that Magic Toyota IS NOT located in Everett. The Toyota dealer in Everett is Rodland Toyota).
'toyota corolla for sale everett' Custom content #1 https://www.google.com/#q=toyota+corolla+for+sale+everett
'toyota corolla everett' Custom content #2 https://www.google.com/#q=toyota+corolla+everett
'2014 toyota corolla everett' Custom content #1 and #2 https://www.google.com/#q=2014+toyota+corolla+everett
Tip: to see how content pages do for the dealership use webmaster tools and not analytics.
Besides the SEO purpose, I like to re-use those pages to build inventory knowledge and resource pages for the dealers like this one, notice that we used Toyota corporate Youtube videos, on there other hand in this case the dealer created their own videos. We decided to add text for indexing to the Toyota Corporate pages but leave the custom videos alone since they are very high quality.
I hope my examples help some of the people here get in the right direction, as I stated before:
1) Don't cancel without an alternative plan
2) SEM alone will not cut it when everyone else gets on it
3) SEO takes time to index and produce, plan ahead
4) Don't forget service and parts!
