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 :)

eBay has sold its 2.6% of Autotrader to confirm the end of the relationship the two companies have shared since the year 2000. Next month, Autotrader will launch its own vehicle auction service.

When I found Autotrader’s official statement about the launch of auctions, I was surprised to read this quote from Autotrader’s Chip Perry:

“Now consumers have the option to not only buy and sell their cars via classified advertising but also through our unique Auction-Style Listing product, which allows conditional, local market bidding – unlike anything currently in the industry.

Touting the uniqueness of a car auction online is odd to me. The more effective here message is “it is free.” No listing fee is a good idea, and I like the way they are pushing it. While Perry is correct that this blend of an auction and a free listing is one of a kind, (the same NYT article says) eBay is the most popular automotive website and Autotrader is the seventh.

Six months ago I explained why I think Google will soon become a serious competitor in automotive classifieds, and I also expect the Goo to continue free listings as most of their services are delivered free with a side of text advertisements.

Will Autotrader make a splash in the auction market with free listings? Can Google seize the market by placing their own car ad listings in search results before links to Autotrader? How did Speed Racer defeat the mammoth car?

In a recent post, I discussed a vehicle lead that I thought was interesting. The question was raised that the lead might have been a scammer (it was not). I thought it would be interesting to discuss how I identify garbage leads that enter my system.

Here’s a list of red flags or warning signals that may indicate that the sales lead is a scam or automated bot garbage. No signal by itself indicates that a lead is definitely garbage, but a combination of a few might.  

1. The same message is sent from different names or email addresses. Scammers rarely submit a single lead on a single vehicle. Most crap arrives in chunks of 5 or 10 leads. While a real person might copy and paste the same message to multiple dealers, they will always use the same name and email address. It is extremely unlikely that two legit shoppers will compose the same email on the same day.

   
   Figure 1

2. Requests originating in multiple cities by a single individual may indicate auto submission. See Figure 2.
3. If a shopper’s name does not match their email address, the lead might have been automatically generated.

   
   Figure 2

4. Mention of a shipping company or agent is likely a scam. Car classified sites get hit with a scam that is popular on craigslist, the shipping agent scam. The alleged buyer is convinced he would like to purchase, and will send a check for an amount greater than the listed price to cover the shipping. This scam is designed to rope the seller into committing check fraud from their own account via the payment to the “shipping company.” Here’s an actual scam message that was submitted to one of my sites:
   

   Hello
   Thanks for the response
   I want you to know that the USA Cashier check you would be receiving shortly is meant for both the buying and shipping.
   Though you are not required to handle the shipping but what is required of you just simple and straight forward and I need to let you know now.
   Immediately you receive the cashiers check……Take it to the bank and deposit it when the funds clear in your account……..Deduct your amount for sale of this item…..Secondly, Transfer the remaining money to the shipping company that would be coming for the pick-up after you might have deducted all the necessary charges…..Finally, fix a convenient date with the freight company that you would be around so that they can come and pick the item up for shipping.
   But I have some questions to ask you please………………………………..
   1) Would you be able to transfer the shippers funds to them same day you receive the funds?
   2) Can I trust you with my money?
   3} confirm your name and address that you want the money send to to avoid sending money to wrong address
   Please email back with your reply to this and let me have your word as I need to conclude this transaction within the shortest period.

More information about this particular scam is all over the web, but my favorite page is provided by the community of craigslist.

The “red flag” criteria listed above can be easily translated into logic to flag leads for an editorial review. Here’s a list of words that I also use to scan messages for dead beats:

• transaction
• freight company
• shipping company
• shipping agent
• cashiers check
• cashier’s check
• your account
• account number
• account #
• account no
• deduct
• the funds
• trust you
• my client
• my customer
• my buyer
• USA
• personal assistant
• shippment
• shipment
• shipper
• westernunion
• western union
• money gram
• money gramm

A list like this is a great tool to flag leads for further review. I will update this post with additional phrases that I add to my filter.

For the last month, I’ve been link building the hell out of Yahoo! Answers. My focus on a single vehicle classifieds site has been extremely successful (and easy). A week into my campaign, I read a blog article that made the Sphinn homepage about how Yahoo Answers traffic can actually eclipse Yahoo search traffic. Boy, was that accurate.

Yahoo Answers is now sending more traffic to my site than any other source, including Google and Wikipedia.

I captured this screen shot from Google Analytics this morning. These URLs are the top referrering websites from September 21 to October 21, 2007.

While looking wide-eyed over this week’s website stats, I came across a used car lead that I must share.

i indicated interest in your ( car) that was advertised on the net.Please i will want to know if it’s still availiable and if it is,Send me:

(i)The final/bottom price of the car .
(ii)Recent pictures of the car.
(iii)Why you are selling the car .
(iv)How long the car has been for sale.
(v)If the car has a clear title
(vi)The condition of the car .
(vii)Any other detail you may wish to give us.

i”ll want to hear back from you as soon as possible

This single email represents the mindset of the majority of car shoppers online. I’m brainstorming how I can change the way I present classified ad listings to answer some of the questions on this list. How many of these items are presented on your advertisements?

Let’s face it: The interfaces of two of the largest classified aggregator sites, Vast.com and Oodle.com, are nearly identical. On both sites, “Cars” is the first category, and on Vast, it’s selected as the default category for searches.

The problem is that a search from the Vast.com home page returns no vehicle search results for motorcycle queries. All motorcycles are in the “Merchandise” category along with boats. Oodle has not made the same mistake. In fact, Oodle’s home page will take any query and find the proper product category to query.  

I know very well what Vast.com is and what it can offer me as a consumer because I’m a search junkie & computer programmer, too. The typical shopper, on the other hand, is just looking for that box where he can type what he wants, and if he’s at Vast.com, he’s not finding that motorcycle.

Here’s a screen shot of the Search Engines Goal Conversion tab on Google Analytics for a classifieds site I’ve been marketing since December 2006.  The goal Conducted Search is reached when a visitor to the site searches the vehicles for sale database. The percentages represent the amount of traffic from each search engine that searched for vehicles after arriving at the site.

I believe this is happening because the site was optimized for very few keywords per page, which resulted in something that MSN/Live.com loves: strong title tags. To find this report within your Google Analytics account, click Traffic Sources then Search Engines and then Goal Conversion in the middle of the page.

I’m always looking for new places to syndicate auto listings, and people like me are currently unwelcome at Windows Live Expo.

Microsoft’s free classified service launched earlier this year, but you won’t find many dealer listings with a search. This service does not support data feed bulk uploads.

Windows Live Expo currently does not support bulk uploads of listings. We are not currently seeking to enable bulk uploads because we want the marketplace to grow organically in its early stages. In the future if we do decide to enable bulk-upload facilities, we will publicly announce the feature with all the relevant details necessary for you to use this feature.

Want to list an item? Start typing. This policy reminds me of craigslist’s “we don’t support businesses, we only tolerate them” business model. These days, everyone is trying to build their own passionate user base by copying craigslist.

Jake of HigherTurnover has concluded round one of his Autotrader vs Craigslist split test, and discussed his conclusion on the HT company blog.

If I made a living out of selling cars, I think first and foremost I would buy the right inventory, and second I would put more emphasis into Craigs List than Autotrader based on cost.