Jeremy Sacco
Posts by Jeremy Sacco
Dealer questions Q&A with CarGurus leadership
Thanks to all the dealers who attended our live webinar today. We really appreciate the chance to listen to your questions and give you the honest answers. An email followup is going out to everyone who registered with a recap of the main themes.
Apologies for a few tech issues. We wanted to be transparent and move quickly, and wound up with couple of glitches. The whole conversation is in there, though.
If you’d like to get on the list to be part of the next round of cash offer testing, here’s the signup form.
UPDATE: Understanding the CarGurus Offers test
Update: Offers test enters new phase
We heard a lot of very helpful feedback on the CarGurus Offers test, which will be valuable as we continue to build an inventory acquisition channel to benefit all our dealers.
The test is now moving to a new phase, in which we are testing CarGurus Offers only in the Sell Your Cars area of our site, targeting consumers selling directly to other consumers that may want to get more immediate offers from dealers instead. We are also preparing to add more dealers in our future testing. Offers is not exclusive to any one partner, our intent is to eventually build an offering that can work for all interested dealers. We are no longer testing Offers on post-lead VDPs.
We know inventory acquisition is an ongoing challenge for dealers, and we believe that we can help. For years, we’ve been working with multiple partners to test new ways to help our dealer customers acquire the quality used cars they need to fuel their business. We’re excited to find new avenues to help you address the growing challenge of inventory acquisition in a balanced, cost-effective manner.
If you’d like to be a part of the next wave of testing, please let us know here. Note that there are technical requirements to participate and limited slots available during the beta.
CarGurus acquires Autolist to expand auto shopping leadership
Big news from CarGurus: we’ve acquired the car shopping website Autolist, adding to our leadership position among online auto marketplaces and providing more value for our dealers by expanding our active car-buying audience.
Like CarGurus, Autolist is a tech-centric online auto shopping provider. Their popular mobile app has millions of downloads, and we believe that engaged audience will provide yet another source of low-funnel shoppers for our dealers. The new relationship is expected to drive additional connections for US-based CarGurus customers in our premium packages:
- Dealers in our Enhanced, Featured, and Featured Priority packages will get Autolist leads as part of their existing subscription at no charge for a limited time
- Dealers on our Standard listings package and our free Restricted listings won’t receive leads from Autolist
Autolist will continue to be operated as a standalone brand for consumers: car shoppers won’t notice any immediate changes to either site as a result of this deal. Both sites and apps will continue ongoing development – now with a larger tech team behind them.
We’re really excited to welcome the Autolist team into CarGurus – and we are looking forward to the benefits this acquisition will offer to our dealer customers and theirs.
Here’s the official press release.
If you have specific questions about what this means for your dealership, please contact your CarGurus rep at 1-800-CarGurus.
This blog posting includes forward-looking statements. For information regarding forward-looking statements made in this blog posting, please refer to the “Cautionary Language Concerning Forward-Looking Statements” section of the press release.
Setting the record straight on CarGurus and SEO
In recent weeks there’s been some inaccurate information being shared about how we approach search engine optimization (SEO). We don’t usually respond to deceptive accusations from competitors, but this topic continues to come up and for the sake of our dealer customers we wanted to clear up any possible confusion.
Let us be clear: We do not engage in so-called “black hat” tactics. We don’t buy backlinks, we don’t cloak content, and we have not been manually penalized by Google. Period.
It is true that a change to Google’s algorithm earlier this year had an impact on our organic search traffic. Despite that, in Q1, we had almost 3X the monthly visits and 1.6X the monthly unique visitors as our next closest competitor, according to comScore MediaMetrix Multi-Platform, Automotive.
2018 in review: the evolution of CarGurus SEM Plus
After launching our SEM Plus product early in 2018, our engineering and product teams worked throughout the year to improve the product and drive better results for our CarGurus SEM customers. Here are some highlights of what we’ve added.
Bing search
We added a second ad partner to the mix for search budget in Q4. Now you can run search campaigns on Bing and Google. While the volume isn’t huge, Bing tends to perform quite well in automotive since its demographics skew toward older, higher-income searchers.
Find the pricing sweet spot with new Pricing Tool updates
While we’re happy to be the number one online auto marketplace, we’re still working hard to give our dealers more and better tools. We recently launched a few updates to our dealer dashboard that should make it easier for dealers to get the most out of our platform.
Dealer Marketing Magazine on avoiding SEM mistakes
Since we launched our SEM Plus product in March, dealers have been giving us great feedback — and asking a lot of great questions about how they can do better. Our Andrew Grochal headed up the development of the product, and in this article in Dealer Marketing Magazine, he outlines several of the key areas that can cause trouble for dealers trying to run their own campaigns. Check it out:
How to Avoid the 4 Common Dealership Mistakes When Running SEM Campaigns.
Full transparency: CarGurus is #1
For 12 years, CarGurus has been building a better way for car shoppers to find the right car at the right price from the right dealer. We’ve always believed that our emphasis on transparency, technology, data, and dealer partnerships gave us the advantage over other automotive marketplaces.
Now, our dealers and shoppers have combined to make us number one among competitive car shopping sites in key audience metrics. According to comScore, CarGurus comes out on top:
Meet the winners: 2018 CarGurus best used car awards
It’s that time of year again — time to reveal the winners of this year’s CarGurus Best Used Car Awards. The full details are in the linked article, but here’s the list of winners:
The awards are based on several factors, including value retention, popularity, availability, expert reviews, and driver satisfaction, so dealers can feel confident using these awards as additional selling points for all of the winning vehicles.