Jeff it was Reynolds we went to Monday night. And while we didn’t go to this one, because we had plans with KBB, I heard the Aspen party was great – that will be a must do next year.

I didn’t even make it over to the west building – totally missed all of my peoples over there!

And while Jeff likes to beat up on Autobase – they did get most improved booth this year. Worst booth went to this service training company that was literally under a stairwell next to the Paul Cummings booth and I believe they just gave up on Tuesday, bc their lights were off and no one was home.

Anything new? Uh No.

People that I missed that I am mad at – ALEX SNYDER!!!! You are in trouble. We are going to be in VaBeach in April – you better have on your entertaining shoes.

Let me see if I can explain the layout…

The main part is a huge circle split into four parts to separate the various departments: sales, support, development, SEO/SEM with their prospective managers easily available on the outside of the circle. The middle of the circle has plush couches and vegetation that inspire people from the various departments to sit down together at. The second floor is a loft/balcony where the executives sit, able to see over 90% of the operation just by stepping outside their office door. There is a gym and tennis courts to go along with the casual-dress environment. It is a great place for anyone to work.

What does it mean for us (the dealers)? Happy Dealer.com employees for a start. Since the move, I have noticed an uplift in demeanor from all the people I work with at DDC. I’ve watched things happen much faster – my requests that need development work are done in days instead of a week or two. I can get tons of answers in one call as the rep I speak to can easily get to whomever has the answers right then. I’m sorry to ramble on about it, but I didn’t realize how much things had improved until I read Mark’s last post – thanks Mark!

I think you bring up some very valid and needed points.

Over the past 2 years Dealer.com has made massive investments in our dealer support and account management staff and training programs. I would dare say they are breakthrough in the sense that we involved the State of Vt and various organizations to build a state of the art training solution that allows us to respond better to our clients issues than ever before.

As an example, just this week we added 8 new account managers that will all start at the same time and begin serving our dealers more and more over time as they become better experts in the field. In the past this was impossible since we did not have a large scale training program and the facilities to host it. We can now train anywhere from 1 to 30 people at a time and do it in an environment that is second to none. Our mission and focus is better than ever before since we were in a 4 story building for the first 8-9 years much like Cobalt’s and it was a very disruptive environment that did not allow our people to talk in person and get “real” answers fast from each of our respective teams.

That issue was answered this past summer when we custom designed the ultimate customer service and technology center just down the street from our original HQ and created what is now the new Dealer.com home. View the full construction video here: http://sappo.dealer.com/slideshow/

You might ask, does the layout and flow of the various teams and staff really matter to me the dealer? Looking from a distance it may seem superficial and unimportant but I can tell you that will all the incredible talent we have at DDC it could be likened to a college basketball player practicing with his teammates for years and then all of a sudden moving to a new sports complex having direct access to playing Michael Jordan every day instead. The level of each person’s game rises dramatically.

As you know we continue to add industry experts to our team to help us with our mission of being the #1 most effective dealer marketing solution possible, our most recent addition was Dean Evans (formerly of Dealix, Ford..etc) that has offered a wealth of expertise to our teams and is even helping to structure better training and education the account managers that assist our clients every day. This will continue as our compensation plans for the industries top professionals are top notch and we will not settle for anyone but the best to join our teams.

We can always do better and that will be our mission in 2008 to deploy the very best possible training, support and proactive care the industry has ever experienced.

-Mark

Mark Bonfigli
President, CEO
Dealer.com,Inc

Thanks for the clarification and detailed response.

I am assuming you have not seen our TotalControl Product? It actually allows starters to get into the SEM game fast and with proven results with full lead, phone tracking and dedicated landing pages or empowers the expert to create very custom keyword lists and geo-targeted campaigns.

It just makes running things faster and easier than ever…sort of like typing an email with spell checker on. Imagine if you had to grab a dictionary every time you were unsure how to spell a word? I guess my point is that we have created a system so simple to use but so powerful for the advanced user that it simply makes sense for dealers to use this as a platform instead of a generic one like google…etc Even the various search engine’s people have remarked how far ahead this is from their own platforms and how much this will help all dealers conduct their campaigns more aggressively.

Let me know if you would like to see it in more detail, I think you would be very impressed!

-Mark

Mark Bonfigli
President, CEO
Dealer.com, Inc

Thanks for the words Brian!

Regarding the award… you’re welcome. I certainly don’t know the percentage of your customers today vs. two or three years ago that are on flash sites. My impression/experience with Dealer.com sites up until the launch of what I believe you call “SmartSites”, was that Dealer.com built a lot of flash to compete with BZ. I know that most of the sites Dealer.com showcased in the early days were very much flash sites.

Anyway… I’m not beating you up about flash. In fact, I’m quite glad you’re deliberately pursuing search engine friendly sites. Your customers deserve it!

With regards to your new SEM product, I agree that dealers can’t create ad campaigns in 10 seconds that automatically produce thousands of keywords for multiple departments. It sounds like Dealer.com has done what many SEM companies have done which is create something for those that can’t really handle “total control.” For the record, I’m ok with that and completely believe that some dealers are best served by using a great SEM solution. On the other hand, I know dealers that are having such amazing success right now doing everything in-house that they’ve dropped Cars.com and Autotrader.

There’s room for lots of products and services in this space and maybe “TotalControl Search Engine Dominator” is truly amazing but, “total control” still suggests no assistance required.

Thanks again for your response.

My best,

Shaun

Responding to the above post:

Shaun,

Thanks for the award!

I am not sure that Dealer.com has never been heavy in flash website design although we did make several flash splash page designs for dealers that demanded them about 4-6 years ago but in general our designs have always been very search engine strong from the beginning. Our flashier designs represented about 5% of the sites we launched during that time frame. When our company was growing and in need of more business we were willing to do the flash designs every so often since they paid well. The truth is that we simply turn these opportunities down now since we have solid metrics and know that don’t convert traffic nearly as well as the solutions we have launched over the past 4 years.

With regards to our TotalControl Search Engine Dominator, there is no way the average dealer could create local automotive search engine ad campaigns in 10 seconds like they can with TotalControl and have 8-10,000 keywords launched for any dept at the dealership. Additionally, the tools inside of TotalControl are above and beyond ad words in that they are all automotive specific and give the dealer unmatched control over creating vehicle specific ads for makes and models in stock in a matter of seconds that are fully tracked down to the call recording (at no charge!) What’s even better is that there is optional landing pages that can be deployed for dealers that are not using the fully integrated Dealer.com website solution.

I urge you to contact me so I can give you a full walkthrough of this revolutionary new way to advertise all the dealership profit centers,

you will be truly amazed.

Best regards,

Mark Bonfigli
President, CEO
Dealer.com, Inc

Mark@dealer.com

The one thing that is for sure is that customers are over surveyed to the point of it bordering on harassment.

my SEM plan is on auto-pilot right now. That’s why I’m surprised to see software solutions out in the market to ‘optimize’ SEM. I login into Google about every other month. I think buying software to do it is overkill.

It took me about 10 hours to complete my plan. I first brainstormed every possible way someone will enter phrases relating to our business. I came up with a list of 700 phrases and then wrote a specific ad FOR EACH PHRASE. I do exact-match. The title of the ad is the keyword. The ad description is the same for all. Yes – it’s alot of work in the beginning – but I haven’t had to touch it for years. I’m using the long-tail approach. Out of the 700 phrases, only about 200 of them are used by searchers in a given month. Some keywords are only used once a quarter, but ad those up and you get very cheap clicks. (costing .10) You then use your website metrics to figure your ROI. I’ve maxed out Google. I was paying $0.58 two years ago, now its $0.71 a click.

I don’t bid to be in the top position. My average position is 2.9. A click is a click to me. It’s a commodity.

I’m now focused on building my organic clicks with a hybrid ‘flash +blog’ approach.