The Top Vehicle Listings Websites - Who's NEXT?

[joe.pistell]

Joe, when you say rank, you are talking about their ranking in organic?

yup.

 

[joe.pistell]

?... My company has eliminated us of all paid inventory third party sites. And we have no intention of ever going back.

You'll never know the value they bring without a detailed Traffic and sales attribution study.

Each dealership has a business profile that'll dictate its ability to successfully live outside classified sites.

To compare and contrast, Think Trulia or Zillow. Would you reccomend a real estate agency to opt out of Trulia or Zillow? Can an real estate agency live without inventory in there? Yes. The impact will be relative to the agency's profile or portfolio.

there is no one solution. It all depends...

 

[ddavis]

yup.

A few days ago, I had lunch with a friend out of Houston. He uses video to capture the top spots in organic for the local market and ten adjacent markets for stores. It is very labor intensive but the increases to website traffic are impressive.

 

[umer.autojini]

I was for CarGurus as they done well on organic... but after looking at cached copies to what user sees... I'm holding back... they are due for a penalty soon... due to hidden text....

google.com/cars had me worried a bit... but after that failed experiment... nothing is going to change.

 

[ddavis]

Todd - I couldn't agree more! Your Own Website (once fully optimized to be found and fully optimized to convert) will always outperform the quality of leads generated by a third party and often at fractions of the cost (i'm looking at you in particular AutoTraitor... eh I mean Autotrader). My company has eliminated us of all paid inventory third party sites. And we have no intention of ever going back.

A Sales Manager is watching one of his salespeople talking to a customer on the lot. He watches the salesperson walk back into the store without the customer. The Manager asks the salesperson, "what happened to the customer?" The reply, "he was just looking". He was "looking" for a salesperson.

Years ago, we would spend $20,000 for a full page ad in the Dallas Morning News and hundreds of thousands on TV. This was to reach the estimated 2 to 2 1/2% of the population that are in the market, for a car, at any given time. 98% of the people we were reaching were tuned out.

A dealership isn't the city park, the Civic Center or the VFW. People don't come into a store to meet new people. They don't go to Cars.com or AutoTrader unless they are interested in a new or used car. My GM never questioned my spending. Actually, he was more prone to throw money at my department. There were 143 stores in the Group and we were the volume internet store. Our internet budget was in the lower 50 percentile.

I don't think that the Datium/Cars.com study got enough play on the forums but here is a link for those that didn't see it.

Never in automotive history have we found an advertising media as effective and cost efficient as the internet. Making display ads work is labor intensive and most dealership do a poor job at it. AutoTrader and Cars.com worked for me. I also had a great team that would get the customer in and close them.

 

[joe.pistell]

I was for CarGurus as they done well on organic... but after looking at cached copies to what user sees... I'm holding back... they are due for a penalty soon... due to hidden text....

google.com/cars had me worried a bit... but after that failed experiment... nothing is going to change.

Umer, like my blog post said, cargurus CEO and his team have the most digital intelligence our space has ever seen*. Look at their SERP performance and Compare their results to the thousands of wanna be players that fight for these ranks.

No my friend, I say rather than be cautious or their tactics, say to yourself, what can I learn from their amazing understanding of the SEO "game"?



*Cargurus CEO Langley S. founded tripadvisor.com, grew it to world class status and sold it. Cargurus is his next move.

 

[MS_mazda]

Let's not forget about eBay, they sorta play on the same field with Cars.com and ATC, but not really. Either way I believe we can exclude eBay (and Craigslist) from the mix for the sake of this conversion.

I'm curious, why exactly would you exclude eBay?

 

[emilymoore]

Has anyone seen Dealer Checker - Dealer Checker

 

[Jeff Kershner]

Has anyone seen Dealer Checker - Dealer Checker

Any classified site that isn't optimized for mobile is DOA.

 

[Manny Luna]

Todd Caputo

That's great that your doing good without using 3rd party, and classified sites.
In looking at your home page, I see duplicate content. See the screen grab below.
This is costing your website thousands of unique visits a month.

I do recommend having some kind of (new and used) listing/classified sites, just not the ones any dealers use within a 100 miles from your location