See You Later Autotrader!

[Stefan]

I gave our 30 days last week.

I used a number of things while making my decision:In house surveys, monitoring leads, phone calls, traffic to our websites, vAuto conversion and lack of AutoTrader advertising in this market.

In House survey

Q: While searching for a car, did you do any online research or shopping? YES NO If YES ...Please take a few moments to indicate which websites you visited.



After 12 months, 25% or less ( 25% Lexus Store, 18% Toyota, Mazda KIA) of the customers that purchased cars from us has visited AutoTrader. One intresting thing was that 82% of the same customers have also visited Cars.com. Are we really missing out?

Leads: on average 10 leads per month.

Phone Calls: 15 calls per month

Traffic to our websites:



Lack of AutoTrader Advertising

Every time when I ask vendors What else do you suggest we do so we better perform on your website? take 50 pictures, write descriptions in Russian cut the price... what else...the answer seems to be: wait, i got this new product... spend more money ( done that ... last year we purchased almost every Alpha available in this market, i know Alpha its a Branding product, and we noticed ZERO increase in leads, calls, traffic to the website or any change in the answers given by the sold customers) !!!

Great... AT - how about you spent some more money to bring more people to your website... we don't control that... Atlanta does. What ever!

Was this the correct decision? Time will tell.

 

[jon.berna]

It never ceases to amaze me that there are still people in our industry who try to value the impact of an online advertising partner with only one or two metrics. Never in the history of the car business has it been so incredibly inexpensive to advertise your used car inventory...never. And yet people who used to spend $5K a WEEKEND in the dang newspaper get all bent out of shape when they see a bill for $5K a month for the opportunity to get your name and inventory in front of where, by conservative estimates, 85% of shoppers look for cars! It boggles the mind!!

Who freaking cares if your advertising spend is dominated by one of the players in the internet space??!!?? Look at the traffic - there are 2-3 times more unique visitors to AutoTrader.com each month as compared to Cars.com - of course they can command a larger price.

Read some articles about ZMOT, take a look at some of the articles and data by Brian Pasch related to attribute tracking on visitors to your own website, and let me know how shutting down AutoTrader does for you in 2-4 months...

The problem with all of the statistics is that they bog down decision making. The reason these statistics exist (from Autotrader) to so they can show value to their product. That's how dealers are waking up one day paying 6-7k a month for something that should be way less expensive. I am all for digital advertising (look at my title) but it has to be at the right price. This overall notion that dealers have to use the two big 3rd party sites to be successful is ridiculous. Fear of loss is greater than the fear of gain I guess.

Really read some articles on ZMOT (I have by the way)...How's about cutting out the middle-man I'm sure there are a few articles on that!

 

[Chris Cachor]

My 2 cents is Autotrader is over-sold.

 

[yagoparamo]

My 2 cents is Autotrader is over-sold.

Agreed, they did it to themselves while they had that gap of years in between them dominating the market and Craigslist coming into play.

BUT--you should also set up your advanced Google analytic and check your funnels, that will give you a much better view of where the traffic comes from.

 

[Jerry Thibeau]

Jerry are your numbers based on a human asking and sourcing or based on technology?

It's based on having the salesperson ask the customer. We teach this in our phone training.

 

[Jerry Thibeau]

Here's another interesting data point that we collect. Every time a call comes in, we listen to see if it's a "New Vehicle, "Generic Used" or "Specific Used" call. 73.7% of all calls that come in are on a specific used vehicle. Where do you think people are seeing this stuff? Not on the manufacturers website, that's for sure. 13.7% of the calls are on generic used cars and 12.6% on new vehicles.


When we sign on a new client, I am amazed at how many people get talked out of not coming in versus appointed. Jberna, How would your dealership perform if I mystery shopped your store? On a scale of 0-5 how do you think your rep would score on our Phone Ninja PSI score evaluator?

 

[jon.berna]

I would need to see your scoring system to answer that accurately. I use a 20 point scoring system that is used for monthly CRC rep reviews in our own database that we track over time. We have been in the 60-65% conv. to an appointment but with so many agents skills vary from rep to rep. Calls route via an ACD to agents using priority routing so agents that convert better get more calls. Seeing as all Hubler Auto Group sales calls go to the centralized call center I would say we would do better than average say 4 on your scale. Unappointed calls get TO'd to a supervisor.

 

[ddavis]

My company listens to 2000 calls a month from various dealers across the country and I can tell you that we are hearing AutoTrader an awful lot when salespeople ask, "how did you hear about us?" AutoTrader is second only to dealer website. Cars.com is 5th on the list. In my opinion, this will cost you sales. The question is can you generate them in other ways. We started tracking this data 2 months ago. Take a look at the graph below:

View attachment 912

Jerry, I would agree with your figures. I can't tell you how many times that I have asked someone that was sourced to my website, where they saw the car and was told AutoTrader. They see the car on AutoTrader and then click through to my website.

 

[Alex Snyder]

My 2 cents is Autotrader is over-sold.

One of (if not the) largest sales forces in the industry did this.

The problem is Autotrader is too high up in the purchase funnel to drive significant traffic toward a lead, phone call, or a visit to an easily trackable website. It also brings a lot of online "tire kickers."

At the end of the day two things caused all the dealers' frustrations:

1. The idea that they can charge newspaper money for digital
2. A massive sales staff on quotas

Pair these together and you have promises and perceptions that weren't accurate. The need for a sales staff to sell and to sell at higher prices than what others were charging for digital ads.

However, I have to give ATC credit for changing some of their ways. It wasn't that long ago we were fiercely debating them religiously on DealerRefresh:

AutoTrader.com Pricing???
Have you been blitzed by team AutoTrader yet?

 

[yagoparamo]

1. The idea that they can charge newspaper money for digital

I think CL is in big part responsible for the loss of that perception. How can you fight free?
That sparked the buy outs last year of KBB, VIN, Hnet, VAUTO, etc.