Car dealers understand that they need to use the Internet to market themselves, some are doing a very good job, others are getting their wings and some will buy just about anything, because they have seen support for the product from named experts in the industry.

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?

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