Uncle Joe Rule #11:
"Every time you solve one business problem, it creates another. It's a success when your new problem is smaller than the older one"
So, before you pull the AT/Cars.com plug, there are invisible issues at work.
--50% of all Auto Shoppers are in market 2 months or more
--They visit 23 sites on average
This means, there is no single path to your store. This means almost all of your shoppers have seen ALL the damn sites out there (KBB, Edmunds, Yahoo, OEM, Your site, Trader, cars.com, Cargurus, and more). If you shut down AT or Cars (or any ad source) it will have a consequence, but measuring the impact is damn difficult to nail down.
The technical term for solving this difficult puzzle is called "sales source attribution". Because our shoppers are invisible and we are a ROBO industry (Research Online, Buy Offline), I felt the clearest picture would come from a delivery survey. Survey at Delivery: A Road Map to Your Store: http://forum.dealerrefresh.com/f43/survey-delivery-road-map-your-store-3751.html#post32317 Its easy to create and run and you'll beable to "see" those damn autotrader shoppers that are so hard to see (until they buy).
Lastly, I'll leave you with some homework from the grand master, Avinash:
Multi-Channel Attribution: Definitions, Models and a Reality Check
