This type of letter would probably be appropriate if it was on a lead gen affiliate site or even a dealer’s website.  This was on a blog, granted it it does push traffic to his dealership website, but the content is primarily about used cars, used car buying resources, tips and funny stories. <I authored that one

It could probably be deemed commercial to an extent, but Eric’s use actually helps build trust in autotrader.com and other classified vendor’s names.  To top it off the dealership he works with spends over six digits a year with Cox Auto Trader.

Their business model is so flawed and is dying.  They charge dealer’s money to provide them with content to push affiliate offers and other on site advertising.  As someone who buys content almost daily this is actually perverse that dealers see this as acceptable.  Then again a sucker is born every minute.

With the onslaught of free listing services and applications being launched the over under on them surviving, without changing their business model, is 3.8 years, if you want the over call me!

With the stories I have heard from consumers, abysmal referral traffic to dealers sites, continual price increases and poor lead volume it is a wonder that any dealers renew their contracts, another bad business model, with them.

I have dealers I work with seeing phenomenal results from sites like craigslist.org, backpage.com,walmart.com, oodle.com and kijiji.com most are not renewing with the paid classified sites.  Give me a call if you want to know more.

This will soon become a relic.

Ben give me a call if you need my address to send me a letter as well.

Technorati Tags: automotive classified sites, autotrader.com, cox auto trader

One of the biggest cool aide fueled concoctions to come along is dealer specific rating sites.  These sites provide an industry specific sounding board for consumers to vent frustrations and give praises of their sales and service experiences.  However they never give an accurate benchmark that consumers can rely on nor provide the marketing leverage they claim to deliver.

A few of these sites are www.dealerrater.com, www.carfolks.com and www.edmunds.com

Generally you have two extremes based on reviews given by consumers at these types of sites.  One is an exceptional number of positive experiences with more ratings than any other dealer in a specific market area or the only reviews the dealership have are negative.  Almost always these reviews are given anonymously or are crafted by dealers referring consumers to these locations to post reviews or even worse paying a marketing company to send consumers to these controlled environments.

Generally these sites steal traffic from the dealer from consumers who are already looking for them and used against dealers to validate their cost to encourage them, dealers, to pay for moderation and marketing perks.  They do this by stealing spots in the search engine results pages when consumers are searching for a dealer by name to deliver the consumer to a site where they see the dealerships ratings and encouraged to look at other dealers in their market area and be exposed, most of the time, to advertising not related to the dealer in question.

Much more reliable reviews can be found at sites like Yelp.com, Google Reviews, Yahoo Local and even Ripoffreport.com and are not subject by outside influences, as much, as auto industry specific review sites.  Also these industry neutral sites provide a platform for dealers and their employees to interact with consumers who have expressed a problem.  A dealer will have more credibility handling a problem in the open and having their consumers give freely of their opinion.

The reason dealers are suckered into the dealer review phenomenon is they are given a false sense of security in knowing that they have the ability to cut off a negative review before it is published.  Where as a true web savvy consumer realizes these review sites are more of a facade and a cash grab by their operators.

From www.automotivedigitalmarketing.com ……. And, since anything negative gets held back for 5 days and the store notified (the benefits of being certified!), there is plenty of time to respond to anything not so pretty before it shows up on the community site.  (Demonstrates why the reviews given are not reliable, a better way to handle it is let the negative review to stand and solve it in the open.  Much more transparency)

Consumers also do not give much weight to opinions given online, both negative and positive, published by unidentified people anywhere near the way they would if the consumer were willing to come forth with their face and name like could be done on a dealer owned testimonials page on the dealers site or blog.  Unless the negative reviews are overwhelming and demonstrate a common problem they really do not prevent consumers from engaging a dealership.  Where as unidentified individuals giving positive reviews do not give the consumer a way to identify with the consumer and look like a fabrication by the dealer or site operator and may do more harm than good as far as the individual dealer credibility.

Dealers, by encouraging consumers to review them at these sites, are giving away valuable web content that they could use to leverage on their own supporting properties thus not increasing search engine competition for their own name.  This is truly a waste of marketing budget and effort for the dealer.  However dealers are used to paying others to build up the authority of their sites as can be witnessed by cars.com and autotrader.com.

From Tactical Technique – If the primary goal is to rank well on page one, where is the logic in helping someone else’s website work towards that same goal?

When dealers have review sites poll their database of customers to solicit reviews they are also exposing their most important asset to compromise.  No amount of assurances by these companies can really guarantee that the dealers customer list is secure, nor does it show any consideration for the consumer.  Big companies have data breeches and dealerships are already prone to litigation by consumers, placing sensitive customer information in the hands of others to built their site with is like playing Russian Roulette.

While industry experts are stating that 81% of consumers use rating sites before buying a car from a dealership it would probably be safe to assume they are looking for ratings on the vehicles.  Dealer rating sites are not transparent enough for consumers to put any real faith in.

Consumers can see past the dealer rating sites, can the dealers?

Technorati Tags: car dealer ratings, carfolks.com, Consumer Reviews, dealerrater.com

The automotive digital marketing space is now the wild west of the auto industry and represents the best opportunity for dealers, who have the ability to make informed decisions, to promote their dealerships and inventory online. Unfortunately for most dealers they rely on recommendations from individuals or companies that have a back end motive in recommending products and services to them. Like the scouting reports that General Custer had before “the Battle of Little Big Horn” and are being lead to the slaughter.

Carnival like atmospheres and gee whiz presentations with recommendations from people who have not changed their game plan in relation to digital marketing in several years is a recipe for disaster. In this space with enhanced consumer awareness and online trends changing at an alarming rate cookie cutter products with declarations of how well they did in 2005 should tell the dealer to be weary.

This problem is not only presented by consultants and agencies who are trying to carve out a space in a niche that they do not understand it is compounded by the fact vendors that operate in the digital space make recommendations that only serve them and not the dealer.

Today there are so many different flavors of cool aid that is being served up to decision makers it is easy for the dealer to become paralyzed and choose to do nothing. Another big mistake.

The list of terms, tools and disciplines in itself can be confusing to a lay person. Automotive digital marketing, online best practices, search engine optimization, search engine marketing, micro sites, landing pages, CRM, ILM, SEO, PPC, websites, process, conversion ratios, email templates, social media, social networking, dealer ratings, click to call, online chat, online classifieds, twitter, linkedin, plaxo, leads, online merchandising, pop ups, pop unders, text advertising, banner advertising, online directories, blogging, squidoo, consumer generated content, have you got lost yet?

Now you have vendors pitching these individual products or combinations of them in packages as the answer to the dealers online marketing effort. Not to mention the training that must be performed for the use and implementation and process development.

Here is the typical situation. A dealer attends a conference and hears buzz words such as social networking, web 2.0, blogging, seo and sem. Currently they have a website and are sending their inventory to classified sites such as cars.com and autotrader.com and realize that they are not getting the best return on their time and investment.

So they contact a SEO vendor and a SEM vendor to help deliver more traffic to their website and realize that their process is broke after examining their lead handling. In comes the process consultant that gets them signed up with a state of the art ILM and CRM system and buying every lead in a 200 mile radius of their store. However the dealer has set a budget for expanding her Internet presence and soon realizes that all the based are not covered so she starts exploring more options. The SEM vendor tells them how they are going to deliver traffic to the stores website through an intelligent PPC campaign and the traffic will be almost instant and the leads will pour in through the site and they don’t need to buy leads and give them more money to drive traffic that closes at a higher ratio.

Now the SEO vendor explains to her that SEM is not permanent traffic and gets is more expensive over the long haul and tells her that she can buy leads for half the price that most lead vendors charge by buying direct from the lead aggregators while they establish a permanent search engine presence.

Now the autotrader rep and cars.com rep are waiting in the showroom to discuss the cancellation letter that was sent in because the process consultant told her not to waste money there to free up more budget so she can access discount credit leads that have been sold to six dealers already in the last 90 days.

Finally after three weeks of this circle jerk she has decided that she has tried the Internet and it is not worth it because it is not working in her store. She can’t find the ball no matter how hard she searches for it.

All the time her inventory data feed has been down because the modem for her DMS is infected with cockroaches where the parts manager dropped a burrito behind it in the parts warehouse where he hides to take breaks during the day and every email from the store is going into a spam filter because they have a local mail server and the F&I manager and title clerk are sending porn and the email around that says microsoft is going to give them $286 for every time it is forwarded to their 800 person contact list putting all the email address in the to field and the person who did online sales two years ago has an autoresponder set up to send every person who has ever submitted a lead through the website a daily email to call him on his disconnected cell phone to get the best damned service and because they need a car today and it is time for them to step up.

And people wonder why dealers have such a hard time getting it.  It is not their process that is broke it all the processes going on around them inflicted by the vendors who ply their trade in the niche or people who are trying to figure out a way to stay in the car business in a consultave role when they do not even know how to set up an email client.

The good thing is for people who are serving the dealers with integrity and for the dealers that operate with integrity and own a franchise other that one of the big three there is hope.  Current market conditions are going to rid the industry of posers and carnies at all levels.  OEMs, Dealers, vendors, consultants and dealership employees who have been faking it for years.

Now is the time for the dealers to act to own their competitive markets and make rational choices.  This can be done through education or finding consultants that can guide them who do not have an interest in pushing a certain vendors products.

Transparency is a buzz word that vendors and consultants use in their pitches to dealers telling them they need to be transparent with their ionteractions with consumers now dealers need to hold them transparent as well.  If a consultant or vendor that is recomending other widgets for the dealer to use in their online marketing efforts will not provide full disclosure as to ther relationship with these other parties the best thing the dealer can do is tell them to play their shell game at down the road motors and seek education and non biased recomendations.

Now that you are ready to leave and go back about your day take a minute and leave a comment and let me know what you think.

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Technorati Tags: automotive internet sales, automotive vendors, online marketing

There are many places people will go to review their dealership experience. If it was good usually you will have to show them the way , if bad and they want to let the world know. Consumers will even go as far as buying domains targeting your brand name, creating youtube videos and filing rip off reports, just to name a few. There are plenty of places that they can rate their experience outside of these venues as well. Yelp.com, Google Maps, Yahoo Reviews etc..

In todays online world people are also blogging about their experiences. These types of reviews often carry more weight than any of the review aggregation services. These blogs may cater to very small audiences to 100 of thousands of hits per day. It is these types of consumer reviews that are worth their weight both in a PR sense as well as learning the real deal in how your customers feel about their experiences.

In a recent blog search I found several post where people were talking about their car buying experience. Here is a sampling of some that really stuck out.

• CJ, talked about his/her? whole process including research. Also the disappointment on how the whole transaction went down. He did not name the dealership but it does give some good insight into the consumer process.
• Arlo Midgett, talked about buying a used Jeep from Atlantic Dodge in St Augustine, FL while on vacation and described the frustration in how they were treated when they arrived at the dealership and the finalization of the transaction.
• Adam Dilip Mutum, Talked about his research process and buying from Station Garage.

None of these stories are totally unflattering but at the same time not completely positive either. All of these stories cumulated in the authors buying a car and describing their experiences. That is the kind of dialog that will have more weight in the eyes of consumers than any rating site can deliver.

Chances are where the dealerships were named no one even has a clue that their customers are talking about them, however the readers of those blogs do; family, coworkers and search engine users. No matter how obscure these references to these business are people will notice. If enough people talk about them there is no doubt it can increase or decrease their online reputation.

One way to monitor what people are saying about you or your business is to set up notifications. Here is a link to a guide on setting up Google Alerts. It may surprise you to find out what customers are really saying in their online world.

Technorati Tags: Adam Dilip Mutum Talked, Arlo Midgett, Atlantic Dodge, buying, Chances, CJ, Consumers, dealerships, Google Alerts, Google Maps Yahoo Reviews, Jeep, None, people, PR, reviews, Sites, St Augustine FL, Station Garage, talk, Yelp

I use a lot of free resources like squidoo.com, craigslist, pay for my own 800 number and even have created my own microsites. All at my own expense. Fortunately I was able to work out a marketing reimbursement for sales I generate that do not cost the dealership any money, if it can be sourced to my own efforts. Now the dealership has taken this and turned it into a spiff for all sales people. Which is fine by me.

I shared this idea at www.drivingsales.com in a contest that they have for the best spiff idea and would appreciate you helping me with this. You can see my submission here (If you will take the time to register and vote for my idea it would be greatly appreciated. )

www.DrivingSales.com is poised to be the driving force in automotive social networking as it will be geared towards dealership employees allowing them to give honest ratings on vendors and share online and offline marketing ideas, management techniques, network and move your automotive career to the next level.

They will be a valuable resource. I have personally spoken with one of the founders and his vision is to move the industry into this century in it’s online initiatives. Stay tuned as I will be interviewing him here in the very near future.

Technorati Tags: drivingsales.com, social networking

I just thought I had a task before. Now I have a real rebuilding process to go through, the difference now is I have a defined budget and complete latitude to make all of the decisions on where the money is spent. My job is to produce ROI. All “paid” services were shut off when I arrived other than the crappy Reynold’s sites, which are not charged to my budget.

Here is what I have for Free:

• Two Reynolds Sites that will eventually be merged into a “Group” website by the end of this quarter. Already in place before I arrived. Will kick and scream to get a location only site back on it’s own domain after this takes place. Those cost will be charged to my budget then.
• Cobalt’s LMCC – For being a 5 Star Dealer. I personally don’t like it other than the price.
• Inventory inside of the 5 Star Site, new and used. It does generate some leads and the price is great.
• Hyundai is rolling out some new features which will be similar to the 5 Star deal it appears. I do not have full details yet, I was made aware of this late this afternoon and did not have time to look at it.

My budget for the next 30 days is only $3000.00 and here is how I am spending it:

• Secondary Finance Leads – $1050. I am not real fond of this but I need to breed some fast activity and this seems to be the best way right now. We have a strong F&I manager and we have some new secondary finance sources available, which I did not have before.
• Automotive classifieds with Cars.com – $900. If it were not for a co-op that we have in place I would not of done it.
• Regional Classifieds – $175 on a rollout package the price is right!!
• Vehix.com – $250 again a rollout. Comcast has a high penetration of the TV market here and they are advertising it like crazy. Being sandwiched between two major metros with Comcast as the main cable provider as well as my local market’s only provider it is another no brainer.

So in all I have spent $2375 in just three days in reworking this. While that does leave some room to take on another project or lead source chances are I will not utilize it unless it is the right opportunity, I may start a PPC campaign with a microsite or two.

Of course I have some blogs going that are delivering leads to affiliate programs and may change their direction in the near future. However since the returns on this are known it may benefit me better to leave those alone as they are not subsidized by my employer. This is a fine line I am walking I know but in the for what it is worth category those are mine and were not developed on their time or dime. Any benefit I receive from them is mine alone. This does not mean I will not create or outsource some user generated content in social networking/publishing platforms to benefit the store, but even then I will maintain control.

Technorati Tags: automotive, benefit, budget, Carl Gregory Chrysler, Cars, Cobalt's LMCC, Comcast, Free, Hyundai, Internet, Inventory, ISM My, leads, Now I, Ok I, PPC, Regional Classifieds, Reynold's, ROI All, Secondary Finance Leads, Sites, Star, Star Dealer, Star Site, TV, Two Reynolds Sites, Vehix, While I

A leak is any action that a surfer can perform on a site that does not benefit the affiliate, advertiser or encourage lead submission. Cars.com and Autotrader.com have huge leaks in their platforms that provide no benefit to the advertiser and cuts into the advertisers profit centers.

Both AutoTrader and Cars.com have advertisements for automotive financing even on premium listings. These are not minor leaks to the advertiser. I was quoted buy an executive at Cars.com that ValueClick pays them $20,000,000.00 a year for their affiliation. So not only is Cars.com making a huge profit from their dealer advertiser base they are also knocking it dead with their onsite affiliate offers.

Profit is not dirty word by any means. But let me ask you this question, If your newspaper required you to place an advertisement for the Local Credit Union on everyone of your display ads encouraging car shoppers to get preapproved before visiting your showroom would you advertise with them? If you answered no, then why would you continue to advertise with online classified providers that do the same thing? Why let a vendor cut into your profit center!!

These leaks are prevalent on every mainstream automotive providers sites. I would not dare send a surfer from one of my sites to cars.com as an affiliate unless I was paid by the click, not the paltry $1.50 they pay if they create an account when there is so many distractions for the surfer when they hit their landing page. That is why they have an almost nil EPC for affiliates inside of the affiliate networks. Adsense would be more profitable at .05 per click than the Cars.com affiliate program.

Which brings me to another leak that I see in salesperson blogs out there. Why in the world would you place AdSense on a blog that you are using to capture leads to sell cars to? I saw one such blog that an Online Automotive Guru was proud of. The only benefit that I see by placing contextual advertising on a salesperson blog is to attempt to monetize the out of area surfer that would not buy from that salesperson anyway. What is the cost? Chances are these blogs don’t generate much contextual advertising revenue, but if you loose one buyer to an advertisement about buying cars at invoice from that blog what have you accomplished?

This is what could really bite. A surfer hits your blog sees the contextual advertisement clicks it and fills out a lead form about buying cars at invoice and then you are sold the lead that now has a price whore mentality. So you made $1.00 for the click, the dealership to pay $10 for the lead that is shared with two other dealers in your market area. If you do sell that price whore lead a car you have made a minimum commission plus $1.00 in adsense revenue and your dealer paid for the lead. Not a smart scenario.

Here is an example from the Used Car Queen blog.

I know as a full time online marketer I would never place my revenue in jeopardy the way car dealers and salespeople do! My time efforts and money are more important than that. As an affiliate I may have more than one choice for the surfer that generates revenue, but when I sell my own products online there are no leaks on my sales page.

Not only do car dealers not understand online marketing, neither do the small players in the Online Automotive marketing circle. Cars.com and Autotrader have it down pat. They take dealers inventory to provide content to their sticky sites, charge the dealers for providing them content, push affiliate offers to surfers and their own lead programs and make money hand over fist while the dealers gravitate to their venues. The only reason they get away with it is because dealers do see a positive ROI if they handle the leads properly, but in the long run a dealer would be better off to reallocate that money to other online advertising to capture their own leads. They would see an improved ROI.

But for Automotive Gurus to place AdSense on a Salesperson blog is ignorance.

Technorati Tags: AdSense, advertisers, affiliate, Automotive Gurus, Autotrader, blog, Both AutoTrader, car, Cars, Chances, EPC, lead, Local Credit Union, Online Automotive, Online Automotive Guru, Profit, ROI, Salesperson, Used Car Queen, ValueClick, When I

Read the full discussion here…

As an online affiliate their plan is ingenuous, as an advertiser I don’t like it at all. I learned along time ago to either accept things, change them or get the hell out of the way and am still torn about what to do with the current platforms. My gut says kill them and do my own thing, but my pocketbook may dictate otherwise in the short term.

I am currently working on a blog network and am producing leads from it. However the keywords targeted in some of the first few are producing leads in Canada and way outside of my market area. What that tells me is I need to sell those leads and target different longtail keywords or get in the automotive lead business

I love my current situation and am grateful for the opportunity.

Some things I am going to do in the near term are:

• Get current photos of me in automotive settings.
• Continue to build blog networks and quasi doorway pages. Never ending proposition
• Watch stats very close – Never ending proposition.
• Maximize opportunities with current online classified providers.
• Work on advertising methods.
• Keep the company site updated diligently.
• Fix the Link Exchange Script here.

90 Day Plan

• Work on linking strategies for stores main sites.
• Have the internet department generating 25 + sales a month. – Will open the door for more support.
• Own the SERPS for specific keywords.
• Product Knowledge for current lines.

Long term plans:

• Build an automotive friendly blogging platform. What gets me is some people can be pros working in a Myspace account but don’t have a clue on how to FTP plugins for a blog.
• A web 2.0 style automotive site.
• Sell the hell out of cars and build a solid internet team in my current situation. Make it duplicable.
• Well this list could go forever ……….

Once again I would like to thank everyone for their input and encouragement over at DealerRefresh.com

Technorati Tags: automotive, blog, Build, Canada, Continue, current, Day Plan, DealerRefresh, Dealers, DearlerRefresh, Fix, FTP, leads, Link Exchange Script, Maximize, Myspace, Own, Product Knowledge, Read, Sell, SERPS, Watch, working

The biggest one is the banner ads at the top and to the right of the listing.  I know that dealers can upgrade packages for it to be their banner on individual listings or to even remove them.  However banners for Netflix – Seen on Autotrader.com and Coke Rewards seen on Cars.com in the search results are a huge leak in what we spend our money for.  We are paying to advertise our offers not Coke and Netflix.

Cars.com and Autotrader.com receive compensation for this advertising either on a CPM or CPA basis.  They are paid for this!  Also there are offers on every dealer’s individual listings for insurance quotes and financing quotes, pushing our lead for our car to either another dealer, through their lead programs, or some offer that distracts the surfer.  This is a HUGE unpardonable LEAK.  If they are going to push affiliate offers using our inventory as the basis to attract the surfer then quite frankly their service should be FREE.   That is a pretty strong statement I know.  We sell cars based on this advertising that we pay for, but we are losing leads due to other advertising that they sell on their site.

However minor these leaks are in lost leads it is still not optimal for what we pay for.  Even if on a basic package with Autotrader.com at $900 per month you should not have other dealers ads appearing on your inventory listing.  The service they provide even in this price range could be duplicated using PPC advertising to your main site to generate targeted leads.  The only problem with this is most car people look for what is easiest and there is a HUGE learning curve in PPC advertising.  If you are not careful you can spend a lot of money with a poorly designed PPC program.

As an experienced online marketer I would never promote an affiliate offer that had a leak as HUGE as this unless it was on a PPC basis.  If they are going to continue to place other offers on our listings whether it is for Netflix or competitive dealers they need to restructure pricing where we pay only per lead/call or completely remove these leaks from their site.  Even free classifieds like Craigslist.org and kijiji.com do not have this problem.

Maybe it is time for another choice!

- Views expressed here are my personal opinion and I assume all responsibility for them.  They do not reflect the opinion of my employer.  This domain and hosting account are owned by SEGA Opportunities and controlled by Paul Rushing

Technorati Tags: advertising, Autotrader, Cars, Coke, Coke Rewards, CPA, CPM, Craigslist, FREE That, HUGE, lead, leak, LEAK If, Maybe, Netflix, offers, Paul Rushing, paying, PPC, Seen, SEGA Opportunities, Views