Automotive Marketing

An american vehicle classified site that I run is receiving double the traffic from Vast.com when compared to data from only one month ago. I believe this is happening for a few reasons.

1. New partnerships every month, like this one with automedia.com
2. This one with overstock.com
3. Or this one with AOL Autos
4. Old partnerships were wisely chosen

Vast traffic beats the pants off any organic search traffic because the referrals are highly targeted. This makes my job easier because pure classified listings are web content of a temporary nature, and search engines are less interested in this type of data unless they find it on craigslist.

Vertical search engines like Vast are changing the game by opening the door to their data. Instead of trying to funnel everyone to their website homepage to conduct a search they operate as a vessel. Crawl the web and learn where the cars are, then help shoppers find them by providing this data wherever someone wants to put it.

When Vast launched people asked “How does it make money?”

1. By offering a service that gives the end user what they want
2. By forgoing requirements to charge for or advertise on everything
3. By tearing down walls between competitors and cooperating
4. By filling a hole that the major search engines have yet to address

Man, I love lists.

At 8:01 AM this morning, Kinh Bui of Dealer Specialties and Chante Velez of Dominion Enterprises sent out emails to every company that sends or receives a vehicle data feed to Dealer Specialties. Both of them forgot to use a blind copy, so now every company on the list has a contact email address for every other company that feeds inventory data to DS/GetAuto. Oops.

Thirty minutes later and I have reduced the list to about 120 unique email addresses. Each of these companies is capable of sending one of only a couple formats, and now I have a means to contact them. You do the math :)

Vast.com has launched a new web site design. I like the old logo a bit more, but this site design is clean, sleek and easy to navigate. Unless you are searching for a motorcycle. To be fair, the search was broken before the redesign. I wrote about it in October. The category structure prevents motorcycles from being returned in default search results.

I search for Buell Ulysses motorcycles for sale everyday. I fell in love with the way this bike looks when it launched, and after riding one at IronValley Harley Davidson, I am convinced this is the motorcycle for me.

Who cares

I think MyRide.com might care. This Autobytel site uses the Vast database instead of their own. AOL Autos might care now that they have dumped Autotrader and replaced them with Vast.