- Dec 30, 2009
- 1,883
- 480
- First Name
- Yago
Most of the people reading this are going to be familiar with past and recent events related to TrueCar, Cars.com, and CarGurus so I'll pass that tedious explanation and go straight to my question.
Looking back just a few years the complains dealers had about 3rd party sites where of 3 types:
1) It is too expensive.
2) I don't like "xyz" (banners, color scheme, VDP layout, etc.
3) I don't get enough leads.
All those are somewhat related to almost every business and manageable between the product sales person/manager and the buyer at the dealer (ISM, UCM, etc).
What is majorly different nowadays is that 3rd party sites used to attract customers with a recognizable name (Autotrader, Cars.com, AOL, Autos, etc) that was in big part supported by traditional media campaigns (TV, sports, magazines, etc) and now they use other methods such as SEO, SEM, and specially "gimmick" targeting (below MSRP prices, know the invoice, learn the tricks, etc).
The job of the 3rd party site was to bring the customer into a place where your car was displayed with more information than other sources (TV, radio, newspaper) and things went from there. Now that job got very murky since during the advertisement process there are multiple ways to guide the customer into directions that may be more beneficial to the 3rd party than the dealer's interest.
So my questions is:
Should 3rd parties be a "window shopping" destination for customers to see everyone's inventory
OR
Should 3rd parties game the system to get customers from more angles?
Looking back just a few years the complains dealers had about 3rd party sites where of 3 types:
1) It is too expensive.
2) I don't like "xyz" (banners, color scheme, VDP layout, etc.
3) I don't get enough leads.
All those are somewhat related to almost every business and manageable between the product sales person/manager and the buyer at the dealer (ISM, UCM, etc).
What is majorly different nowadays is that 3rd party sites used to attract customers with a recognizable name (Autotrader, Cars.com, AOL, Autos, etc) that was in big part supported by traditional media campaigns (TV, sports, magazines, etc) and now they use other methods such as SEO, SEM, and specially "gimmick" targeting (below MSRP prices, know the invoice, learn the tricks, etc).
The job of the 3rd party site was to bring the customer into a place where your car was displayed with more information than other sources (TV, radio, newspaper) and things went from there. Now that job got very murky since during the advertisement process there are multiple ways to guide the customer into directions that may be more beneficial to the 3rd party than the dealer's interest.
So my questions is:
Should 3rd parties be a "window shopping" destination for customers to see everyone's inventory
OR
Should 3rd parties game the system to get customers from more angles?
