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Hey Gang,

I worked on the Auto team at Google for 7.5 years and the large auto endemic sites buy a ton of Google Ads to drive traffic to their sites to generate leads that they can then sell to dealers at a markup. That is not inside info, with this thread being perfect evidence of that.

IMO, where the rubber meets the road here is if the endemic sites are using your vehicles to run VLA ads to drive traffic to generate leads for other dealers that they then profit from.

At the end of the day, read your vendor contracts and the language around what they can do with YOUR inventory.

I think that you are definitely bleeding sales opportunities by allowing the endemics to run ads with you vehicles when you could be running these ads yourself and getting more leads. Dealer websites convert traffic to leads 4x better than endemic sites, so I would definitely max out your VLA spend within your budget if you can.

You could easily set up an A/B test with the right measurement in place to determine if their ads are helping or hurting your dealership.

Just my $.02