There has been a lot of talk about the changes in AutoTrader’s pricing, so why don’t we get this beast out in the open for better or worse?

What do you think of AutoTrader.com’s price hikes?

Posted by Alex Snyder on behalf of a few dealers.

Share the wealth!

Premium Partner with AutoTrader – Again!

Well I did it again. I signed up for another year as a Premium Partner with AutoTrader for their 2007 product.

I was tempted to drop down to the Featured Listings package or get rid of AutoTrader all together and shift my budget over to Cars.com. Not because AutoTrader doesn’t perform well for us, but due to the increase in pricing. We are a smaller dealer and I’m lucky to have 50 used cars on the lot at any given time. Once you take the monthly price and spread it out amongst all my used cars, I was already spending more then I like per car for advertising.

What keeps me going with AutoTrader is the positive ROI I’ve been able to track using the service. Even with the high cost per lead and advertising cost per car, the ROI makes total sense to continue on for another year. Though if they keep hiking their price, this may be my last signed contract.

My biggest complaint I have with AutoTrader is with the price increase each year, they try to sell me on the new “added features” that do nothing to sell me more cars. Like adding the ability to add more photos of your dealer for your dealership profile or the new “Reduced” icon that shows up when you change your pricing (being a Mercedes dealers I think it sort of cheapens the car).

The new Print Vehicle Brochure is a decent addition but the load time for the brochures can be horrendous for slower computers. They should allow the consumer the option for a full or mini brochure (cutting some of the photos and having the option omitting the Carfax).

The best part of the new 2007 product is the new Admin! (if it would only work, but I’ll touch on that later). Now when you log in, you get an inventory age report along with a list of your Top 10 New and Used vehicles. But there’s a problem with the Top 10 reports and something I have been complaining about for along time. The Top 10 reports shows how many times a particular vehicle has shown up in searches BUT it’s for the entire time the car has been in inventory. Obviously if I have a car in inventory for 3-4 months, it’s going to be higher on the list then say a car that’s been listed for only a week. AutoTrader needs to allow us to designate a time period for this report to have any real value.

The most impressive feature is the Market Comparison. While viewing your inventory list screen you get an overview of the average price of similar inventory listed on AutoTrader. This allows you to see how your vehicles compare to the competition. Of course these are just averages, but when you drill down to the vehicle specifics and click on the Market Comparison tab, you get a full list of your competitive inventory while allowing you to click and view the actual vehicle listing. This is something I do before spotlighting a car but I would have to search from the consumer side of AutoTrader. I can now stay inside of the AutoTrader admin, compare my inventory and pricing to the competition and then Spotlight, all from one screen.

Another gripe I have with AutoTrader is the deleting of inventory. If you make any change to a vehicle in the AutoTrader admin, it “locks” that vehicle into your inventory. You are then forced to manually delete the vehicle when it sells. I can see how this would be a huge pain for a larger dealer with more inventory. I don’t understand why they can’t build a rule that says if you make a change to vehicle and it “locks” into your inventory, it will delete if the vehicle is not in the feed from your DMS or inventory tool like Homenet or ebizautos after 2 or 3 updates.

Overall it looks as if AutoTrader actually put some thought into this new admin. BUT as I mentioned earlier; “if it would only work”. Unfortunately after only a few minutes playing around, I ran into several issues. I changed the price of several cars form the vehicle listing screen only to find when I did, it was deleting all the photos for that vehicle. I can’t seem to get our videos attached to the inventory to show up in the multimedia portion of the vehicle listing. When I choose what vehicles I want to show in the Dynamic Display, it doesn’t update and reverts back the original setting.

Hopefully by the time you read this, these issues will be taken care of. I know I’m always giving AutoTrader a rough time here on DealerRefresh but when you’re the Big Guy and you want to charge a premium price, I expect a premium product with premium service.

So another year on AutoTrader for me..we’ll see how this year totals up!!

Share the wealth!

Few week back I wrote an article “AutoUSA – Something isn’t kosher!”. I pointed out that somehow AutoUSA had resold me my own test lead 2 times over and I had screen shot to prove
it.

If you read the comments, you will see where Phil Dupree – VP of eCommerce for AutoUSA joined in on the conversation and actually took an initiative to research how this could have possibly
happened.

Phil Dupree said – “All three of these leads were individually entered on the Yahoo! Autos website. Yahoo! Autos has confirmed that they never resend leads—each is uniquely entered by users. Since Yahoo! sends leads from their website only, they confirmed that these leads were typed in on their “get a free price quote” lead form which has dealers listed for selection. Whoever typed in these leads had to specifically select your dealership in order for us to send you the lead. Since the leads are several months apart, we did not filter them out as
duplicates."

To this day I still do not have a clear explanation to why I was resold my own test lead 2 times over. I was never pointing my finger at AutoUSA but yet new something wasn’t kosher.

But..then my boy Chad Long over at AutoOneMedia sent me this link. “Yahoo! Gets Caught With Their Hand in the Cloaking Jar”. As I read this article, I started to wonder if maybe, just maybe it was Yahoo’s ignorant oversights that caused this mishap. If pages within Yahoo autos are/were “accidentally” being cloaked, is it possible Yahoo or a department within Yahoo could be accidentally reselling leads to AutoUSA? I can’t imagine reselling a few leads here and there would ultimately benefit a company as large Yahoo. And if they were doing this on a grand scale, I would think they would have already been caught (but then maybe they have).

I’m still very curious to how this happened and where exactly the blame falls, but we guess I will never know.

Share the wealth!

Back in August of 2006, I was mystery shopping on Edmunds. I wanted to see what type of responses I would get if I requested a price quote for a Mercedes-Benz E350. I of course figured I would get my own lead (since I purchase my New Car lead from AutoUSA), but was hoping that I would get a response from one of my competitors as well.

I did receive my own lead and rightfully so. I called up my AutoUSA rep and explained that it was a test lead and they had no problem replacing it with another valid lead.

Then in Feburary of 07, something weird happened and  AutoUSA sold me the same lead again..same name, same car, everything exact. Keep in mind, I NEVER used the same name to shop for another vehicle within that time frame. At first I thought it was a glitch with my eLead CRM. But when I logged into my AutoUSA account and there is was! 

I found this to be a little disturbing and was very disappointed in AutoUSA since I usually get my best leads from them. Receiving my own lead after mystery shopping was expected. Buying the exact lead again made me question.

Monday morning 4/29/2007 I log into my CRM only to find Maire Zahn, the same lead in there AGAIN! Same name, same vehicle, SAME LEAD! Let me point out again, I DID NOT USE this name to mystery shop. It would have been Sunday and I was doing yard work all day so there is no way I used my Sunday to mystery shop dealers.

Basically I had been SOLD the exact same customer lead 2 times over from AutoUSA. I’ve heard this happens quite often from someone that is a veteran in the 3rd party lead business. Apparently it’s common practice for many Lead vendors to resell leads to dealers after a period of time of the initial request. Their thought is; since many dealers do not execute the right amount of follow-up and in order to uphold their services and reputation, it’s a good idea to resell the leads after a period of time. Maybe they run the customer leads up against a DMV database of customers that have bought vehicles in the last 90 days?

Anyways, I again called my AutoUSA Rep to point out the fact that this was the second time. For some reason, he quickly got on the defense and said (and I quote) " That’s part of the business". WOW, I was not expecting that type of response. I was only calling to point out what happened and maybe who they are buying this lead from is reselling to them. Whatever the case maybe, something isn’t kosher here.

I’m not accusing AutoUSA of anything specific here and I’m really surprised I’m having this issue with AutoUSA. Like I mentioned before, I usually get my best leads from them. BUT I am disappointed that a quality lead provider is participating in such possible tactics.

Have you experienced this? What’s your feedback?

Share the wealth!

iMotors / Reply leads for your dealer interest sales department

I “usually” keep my negative opinions to myself. BUT there are times where I find the need to take my voice above the boundaries.

When I first started here at Mercedes-Benz of Hagerstown, I quickly jumped on board with a few 3^rd party lead vendors to get the ball rolling. For some reason or another I brought iMotors (division of Reply Inc.) on board. Two months using their service I found myself spending more time managing duplicates and bad leads then actually following up and selling to qualified buyers. I quickly realized that it was not making sense keeping iMotors (Reply Inc.) on board as a 3^rd party lead provider for my dealer. So I axed them!!

Then last year, (Sept 2006) I started getting phone calls from one of their sales representatives again. I’ll have to admit, she had a sweet voice!! She called and called, convincing me that they had changed their “lead filtering software” since I had past used their services. Matter of fact, they even had a higher-up sales manager call to re-enforce the fact that they had made vast improvements in their process and software for filtering qualified leads. Now..I’m not a fool and I didn’t bite right away!! BUT “she” kept calling me! You know what it’s like to get that phone call that stimulates the ears. And I have to admit, I can be such a sucker. I’ll buy anything from a persistent sales person that can follow-up and be so convincing. Before I knew it I was signed up with iMotors..again.

So I don’t sound like such a sucker here, I’ll let you know that I worked the price down to a very persuasive cost per lead, AND since we wanted to have a strong end of the year push, I was biting on anything that made sense.

Before signing the agreement, I informed the sales lady that I ran a website and IF this time proved to be a flop, I would write about it (hence the reason for this posting). So…2 months back into using iMotors, it wasn’t setting the world on fire (but then again what 3^rd party lead does?). I have an effective follow up process established here at the dealer so no one could accuse me of not following up with each and every lead. The end of the year was approaching and by then we had 1 credit sales for iMotors. The crazy part was; the gross was very considerably high, so I continued on with the service.

BUT by the end of February I found myself back in the same boat that I was in the first time using iMotors, too much time following up with duplicates and bullshit leads. I was getting leads for cars that no longer
existed in the Mercedes model line. Now, one could argue and say; “Jeff…you need to call every customer and ignore the car they are requesting a price quote on”. Well, I was and always do!! We were calling every customer and totally ignoring the vehicle of interest that was quoted on the lead. BUT the problem was most of the phone numbers were bogus or no longer in service. Complete total CRAP!!

Throughout the course of Jan, Feb and March, we sold 1 more credit sale for iMotors (again a decent gross), but it came to a point where it was not worth the time and effort to keep them around. The ROI on paper was making sense, but when you factored in my time and energy, my sales peoples time, the confidence in the service, it was not justifiable. So I AGAIN axed them!

The positive points were; the customer service was nothing less then great. They willingly credited every lead I asked to have credit for. The 2 cars that I sold during the period of using iMotors (again) were very lofty. BUT, it became too much for me to manage every month. The time that I spent following up with bogus leads and getting credit for these leads was costing me too much time and money at the end of the month.

I’m not saying iMotors will not work for your dealer. I’m merely pointing out that it didn’t work for my dealer on 2 separate occasions. I’ve taken the liberty to post my last 3 months of leads I received from iMotors (erasing the customer last name) with the current “status” each customer was in at the time of this posting. You can see most of them are marked “Bad Lead” and believe me I’m being generous. Several of the leads are in limbo/working status and I’m still not sure if they are real people or not.

Sorry iMotors, but I gave you fair warning.

Share the wealth!